


No Air

by SeeEmRunning



Category: Glee, Supernatural
Genre: AU, Angst, Crossover, De-Aged, Gen, High School, Humor, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt!Coping!Sam, Mental Illness, SPN/Glee, Sam without Dean
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:29:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeEmRunning/pseuds/SeeEmRunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the showdown with Dick Roman, Sam wakes up in the hospital as a fourteen-year-old. He finds himself rebuilding his life in Lima, Ohio with the help of fake IDs and a friend of Garth's. But puberty isn't easy for anyone, even the second time around, and Sam finds himself struggling to juggle school, work, and the lingering trauma of Hell. (M for language, content)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teenage Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dancing Days](https://archiveofourown.org/works/137895) by [saddle_tramp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddle_tramp/pseuds/saddle_tramp). 



> I'm not entirely sure how this came about, except I read 'Dancing Days' by saddle_tramp and fell in love with the idea. It's going to be medium-length, I think, probably somewhere between 40 and 70K. Then again, it might run away on me and/or stop speaking to me altogether, so anything could happen.
> 
> This fic contains/will contain strong language; non-explicit mentions of consensual, underage sex; torture scenes (which will be warned for in specific chapters and set off in italics); depictions of undiagnosed mental illness; and departure from canon in both shows (because I kinda lost interest in Glee once I graduated high school and Sam was never de-aged in canon SPN).
> 
> Updates may be sporadic.

"Dean?" Sam asked hazily when he could think straight again.

 

"Is that your name, honey?" he heard a woman ask.

 

He forced his eyes open. "M'name's Sam. Where's Dean?" After a minute, the white blurs resolved into ceiling tiles. He turned his head to the side. A woman in cartoon-bear-print scrubs was squinting at something over his head and scribbling on a clipboard. Hospital, then. That didn't bode well.

 

"Was he with you, hon?"

 

"Yeah." Sam blinked. He wasn't accustomed to female nurses who called him 'hon'; he usually got ones who were practical and male, especially once he'd been redressed in a hospital gown and his rather impressive collection of scars was noticed. He glanced down - yep, he'd been changed. Cleaned, too, he noticed, and a bit smaller than he remembered.

 

He forced himself to take in the rest of the room with growing dread. White walls surrounding two dozen beds filled with children and teenagers confronted him. Now that he was listening, he could hear the soft _whoosh-click_ of a ventilator hooked to a girl on the other side of the room.

 

Sam was lying in the pediatric ICU, a foot shorter than he had been when he'd gone into Dick Roman's stronghold and starting to panic. "Where's Dean?"

 

"Who's Dean, Sam?"

 

"My brother." Sam moved himself to a sitting position. "Was he brought in with me? Is he okay?"

 

"Slow down, hon. Nobody was brought in with you."

 

"What happened?" Sam knew what happened before he blacked out, remembered Dean and Cas tag-teaming the leviathan ruler, but he didn't know what came next.

 

"We were hoping you could tell us that, sweetie. All we know is you were found in a room in Roman Enterprises."

 

"Was there anyone else there?"

 

"No. Was someone supposed to be?"

 

Sam swallowed hard. "My brother and two friends were with me. Where's my phone?"

 

"With your clothes, sweetie. You'll get them when someone comes to get you out."

 

Sam scowled. "Can I get it now? I need to look up a number."

 

"You can't call anyone on it, dear."

 

The sheer number of endearments made Sam want to vomit. "I know, it'll screw with the equipment you use, but I need to look up the number of someone I can stay with."

 

"Why don't you know it?"

 

Sam rolled his eyes, trying to play the hormonal teenager he looked like. "He's a family friend, and it's in my phone anyway."

 

"Let me talk to the doctor," she said, patting his arm and moving to the next bed.

 

***

 

The doctor turned out to be a woman with silvering blond hair and a weary smile. "Sam, is it?" she asked him.

 

Sam nodded. "What's wrong with me?"

 

"We're not sure. We haven't found anything to explain why you were unconscious when you were brought in. Can you remember what happened?"

 

Sam didn't feel like lying, and he knew he'd get further if he gave them something, so he said, "I remember a lot of light and a lot of pain. Then I woke up here. What am I hooked up to? Saline, I'm sure, but what else?"

 

She frowned. "We don't usually discuss that without a guardian-"

 

"I'm alone here, doc, there's no one else to discuss it with. My brother was my legal guardian" - when Dean was eighteen, he and John had worked out a shared custody agreement so if John was killed CPS wouldn't be able to split them up - "and it's looking like he's at least missing, so why don't you just tell me what I'm hooked to and we can go from there."

 

"Fine. You're only on a saline drip. We didn't want to give you anything else before we knew what was wrong." She stopped, reluctant.

 

"What tests have you run?" he probed. "I know the tox screen came back clean."

 

She frowned. "Yeah, it did. Your blood work came back fine. EKG and ECG came back normal. We haven't found a reason for you to be unconscious that long."

 

"So I'm in perfect health," Sam summarized, "except that I was unconscious."

 

"Right." She didn't seem happy about that.

 

"Then I'm leaving." He swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Where are my clothes?"

 

"You can't leave yet," she protested.

 

"Why not? You just said I was fine."

 

"You need a guardian to -"

 

"I just told you, my brother's missing," Sam growled. "There are some people I can call, but for that I need my phone, and for that I need my clothes."

 

"You can have your clothes," she bargained, "as long as you stay here until I have a chance to talk to some people."

 

"You're calling CPS," Sam said flatly.

 

"You're only fourteen, Sam -"

 

"How d'you figure that?"

 

"Growth plates on your arm haven't fused together yet. You're still a teenager."

 

"Why fourteen? Why not thirteen, or fifteen?" Sam pushed. He knew he was being a whiny brat, but he really didn't care. As far as they were concerned, he was a teenager in the throes of puberty.

 

"I just thought you looked fourteen."

 

Sam's eye twitched, a nervous habit he hadn't grown out of until his sophomore year of college. "I'm sixteen. Clothes and phone, please."

 

***

 

"Hey, Sam, what's up?"  
  
Sam let out a sigh of relief. "Hey, Garth. I - um - see, the thing is - uh -" He cut his eyes over to the nurse awkwardly and took a deep breath. "Bit of trouble. Dean's gone, the two friends we were with are gone, and I'm in the hospital. Do you know if anyone's near Ohio?"

 

"Gone how? Gone as in…" Garth trailed off.

 

"No idea," Sam admitted. "Passed out, woke up here. Supposedly they didn't find anyone else with me."

 

"What were you hunting?"

 

"We took care of it."

 

Garth sighed down the line. "Where in Ohio are you?"

 

"Thanks, Garth." Sam rattled off the address.

 

Garth showed up three hours later. Sam was almost to his breaking point, stressed about Dean, Cas, and  Kevin going missing as well as his newly-regained youth. Unused to his body's limitations, Sam was clumsier than he'd been since a toddler. He'd fallen four times, knocked over six or seven cups of water, and reached for objects that had been well within the range of his long arms but were now beyond his reach. He was frustrated, upset, dreading anyone seeing him so vulnerable, and growing more afraid that whatever had happened to him was irreversible.

 

"What the Hell," Garth said.

 

"Pretty much my reaction," Sam said tiredly. He was swimming in the clothes that had once been just slightly too small on him.

 

"What the hell did you do?"  
 

"Not here, Garth," Sam said tiredly. "Do you mind giving me a ride? I need to find the Impala and start looking for answers."

 

Garth's mouth closed into a thin line. "Yeah. Let's go before the nurses find us." Sam had been waiting right outside the elevators to grab him. Clothed, it was a simple matter to leave without anyone knowing he hadn't been released.

 

As soon as they were in Garth's car, Garth turned to Sam and ordered, "Spill. What were you hunting and why didn't you have backup?"

 

Sam swallowed. "Leviathan. And I did have backup, I had Dean and a freaking angel with me, but they disappeared. So did the guy we were protecting."

 

"So what's a leviathan?" Garth prodded.

 

"Think shifter, but unkillable and with a love of eating people."

 

"Anything's killable," Garth argued.

 

Sam laughed hollowly. "Garth, we tried everything. Decapitation slows them down, but if you don't keep the parts separate, they just reattach. Even if they're a couple feet away from each other they'll manage it. Silver, salt, bronze, tin, holy water, acids - nothing hurts them but Borax, for some reason."

 

Garth whistled. "So when did these nasties show up?"

 

Sam resigned himself to telling Garth everything from his first death, which set off Dean's deal and the breaking of the first seal, to what had happened the night before. He made Garth pull over first.

 

"Wow," Garth said an hour later. "I'm really glad I'm not you."  
 

Sam had to laugh. "So. I'm pretty sure this isn't a spell. When the leviathan exploded, it must have altered reality. I still have my memories, which means I have my soul, so it only affected the physical plane. I wasn't sent back in time, either, because you're here. I'm me, just younger, but I still have all my scars and my tattoo. It's weird." It really was weird, to have all his marks slapped on his teenaged body; everything Sam knew told him the marks should have gone away and left him with either the scars he'd had at fourteen or with none at all. He couldn't figure it out.

 

Garth restarted the car. "So where do you go from here? No offense, but I don't think having a kid with me would help to sell the law enforcement shtick."

 

"Wouldn't ask you to take me," Sam said. "You're cool and all, but the only person I've ever been able to live with is Dean." He swallowed. "Was Dean." He hurried to move on. "I think the first stop needs to be the impound lot. That's probably where they took the Impala, and I need my weapons. Then I need some clothes and ID, because I have no idea how long I'll be like this. I don't even know where to start looking for answers, so I'll probably fake my way into an apartment, get a job, start researching."

 

"School?" Garth asked.

 

Sam frowned. "Hadn't even thought about it. I guess, yeah, that's gonna need to happen."

 

"I have some friends nearby," Garth told him. "Not hunters, but they know enough to not want to know any more. They can help you get set up and talk to the principal. Maybe they'll even have work for you, they own a garage."

 

"I can do that," Sam said.

 

"I'll call them and tell them you're coming. We'll get your ID tonight. I'll meet you at the park we passed about five miles back, I'm gonna stop by Goodwill and get you something that isn't so big on you, then you can get whatever else you need when you stop looking like a drowned rat."

 

Sam grimaced. "Yeah. Forgot how small I was back then. Back now? Fuck, I don't even know what tense to use."

 

"You'll figure it out," Garth promised him.

 

To his surprise, Garth was right. Sam had finagled a cheap, shitty apartment on the outskirts of a town called Lima - _Really, who names these places?_ he wondered - and had protected it straight away. There was a devil's trap painted under the carpet, protection wards in shadowed areas, angel banishing sigils on the insides of both doors (one to the bedroom, one to the bathroom; it was a very small apartment), salt on all entrances, protective hex bags hidden in the cupboards, and at least one weapon within easy reach no matter where he was in the apartment. The demon-killing knife was kept at the small of his back, his favorite .45 at his hip. He couldn't openly carry either, but it made him feel marginally safer to have them on him.

 

Garth's friends, the Hummels, turned out to be his cousins by marriage twice removed, or something like that. Kurt was sixteen, fresh-faced and happy-go-lucky, and Burt was obviously fond of him. As Garth had suggested, they found him work at the garage. It was only part-time, but the pay was good enough Sam wouldn't have to worry too much about rent. They knew the basic shape of what had happened - traumatized kid, brother disappeared in supernatural occurrences, hunter family - but no details.

 

Even his old skills were coming back to him. He had adapted to his shorter reach and stature and kept up with the routine he'd established back when he'd been learning how to defend himself: start the morning with a five-mile run, do inside exercises for a while, go through pattern exercises with his usual weapons and hand-to-hand forms, run another five miles, and stretch through a cool-down. He didn't have the skill or sheer mass that had been his just days before, but he was far from helpless.

 

The school hadn't given him too hard a time. He said he'd been homeschooled in Oklahoma and had moved as an emancipated minor once his brother and guardian had disappeared. The friend Garth had gotten to make up the IDs had managed to fake a police report and put it on the database, so if anyone called to check his story, it would get confirmed.

 

Four days after he'd been turned back into his teenage self, Sam faced down the school building. He'd registered the day before, after classes had been left out, and now all he had to do was find the office of a Ms. Pillsbury and get his classes scheduled. Glancing at the entrances, he didn't see metal detectors. That was a good sign - there was less of a chance the demon knife would be discovered. He hoisted his knapsack on his shoulders - it had been small for him at his previous height, but now it was too big for comfort - and headed in.

 

Ms. Pillsbury's office was, thankfully, near the main one. The halls were almost empty, since he'd been instructed to come in an hour before school officially started. He knocked on the wall - and really, what kind of school had _glass walls?_  - and waited for her to look up.

 

She was a pretty woman, with a pert nose, brown hair and eyes, and clothes that looked like they were from the 1950s. Her desk was neatly organized. "Oh, hello! You must be Sam Winchester."

 

Sam had decided, after much deliberation, to keep his name. It wasn't like anyone would match his fourteen-year-old face to his thirty-year-old one, and if they did, well, who cared? If something nasty knew how to check school records (though he doubted any of them did) and cared enough to look him up, he wasn't sure if he'd fight or just let them rip him apart.

 

"Yes, ma'am," he said, trying to smile.

 

"Oh, come in! It's nice to meet you, Sam. Let me just get your file up." She half-stood and reached across the desk, and Sam shook her hand before she sat back down, squeezed out a dollop of hand sanitizer, and started typing. "Let's see here. You're an emancipated minor and were homeschooled?"

 

"Yes, ma'am."

 

"Can I ask what made you move to Ohio and start public school?"

  
  
"My brother, he…" Sam's throat threatened to close. "He took care of me, but he...disappeared. I had to get away, and my car ran out of gas just outside of town, so I figured I'd settle down here."

 

"I'm sorry to hear that, but what about your parents?"  
 

The sight of John's body crumpled on the cold tile of a hospital floor flashed before his eyes. "They died a while ago. Dean - my brother - he got custody of me a few years ago."

 

"It sounds like you were lucky to have him."

 

"Yeah," Sam said, fighting back the tears that threatened. "I really was. Listen, not that memory lane isn't a nice place to be, but do you mind if we move on to scheduling? I'd rather not start out by getting to my first class late."

 

"Of course," she said. "What grade are you in?"  
 

Sam shrugged. "Well, I'm sixteen, so...eleventh, maybe?"

 

She typed into her computer. "We only have one English and one history course you can take this year, but we have some math and science courses to choose from, and there's your foreign language to consider."

 

"Do you offer Spanish?" Sam asked.

 

"We do." She smiled brilliantly at him. "Mr. Schuester is a wonderful teacher. I take it you want Spanish 1?"  
 

"Actually," Sam said awkwardly, "I already know a bit of it. Is there a test or something I need to test out of the first level?"

 

"You'll have to talk to Mr. Schuester about that," Pillsbury told him. "He usually comes in about forty minutes early, so you can go down to him when we're done here."

 

By the time the meeting ended, Sam was signed up for chemistry, PE, Calculus II (whether he would stay in that class or dropped back to Calc I depended heavily on his first few grades; since Sam had aced it at Stanford, he was relatively sure passing it at Podunk High would be easy enough), English 11, US History, and a Spanish course. How those were arranged would depend on where his Spanish slot would fall, so he went down to find the room assigned to Will Schuester.

 

He found the room more quickly than he'd expected to, given how long it had been since he'd been inside a school, and knocked on the doorframe. The man writing on the chalkboard turned around. "Can I help you?" he asked, smiling.

 

"Are you Mr. Schuester?" Sam asked. When the man nodded, he continued, "My name's Sam. I just transferred here, and Miss Pillsbury said I had to talk to you if I wanted to test out of Spanish 1?"

 

"All right, well, come in and we'll see what we can do," Schuester said, moving over to the desk and pulling a book out of a drawer. "Where'd you come from?"

 

"Kind of all over," Sam said vaguely. "I've been homeschooled for a while."

 

"I gotcha. Let me see here...okay, this will be good. This is the text we use for first-year Spanish," Schuester explained, handing the book to him. It was already opened to a paragraph. "Translate that and we'll go from there."

 

Sam looked at it for a moment and started reading. "The cat is drinking milk on the windowsill. The mailman comes up" - his eyes skipped down the page - "really, man, this is seriously stilted writing." When Schuester raised his eyebrows, Sam kept going.

 

"I didn't expect you to start speaking," Schuester admitted when he was done. "I thought you'd start writing."

 

"Didn't much see the point in that, given the difficulty level."

 

"So you've obviously mastered beginning Spanish."  
 

Sam shrugged. "I'm better with street Spanish than formal, but yeah. I can carry on a conversation."

 

"Tus padres te enseñan?" Schuester asked. _Did your parents teach you?_

 

Sam shook his head. "No. Ellos murieron hace unos años." _They died a few years ago._

 

"Así que cuidó de ti entonces?" _So who looked after you then?_

 

"Mi hermano." _My brother._

 

"¿Está bien?" _Is he nice?_

 

"Él era." Sam swallowed. "Desapareció y lo es muerto, así que estoy por mi cuenta." _He was.He disappeared and is dead now, so I'm on my own._

 

"¿Cómo estás viviendo?" _How are you living?_

 

"Amigo de un amigo encontró trabajo para mí en su garaje. Es suficiente para la comida, un apartamento, y el gas." _Friend of a friend found work for me at his garage. It's enough for food, an apartment, and gas._

 

"To be honest," Schuester said, "I don't even know why you're taking Spanish instead of French or Latin. You're obviously fluent."

 

"Quoque sum facundus in latinam," Sam told him, "and I don't particularly want to learn French."

 

Schuester blinked at him. "I'm going to guess you just said you know Latin."

 

"I said I was fluent, but yeah, that was the gist of it." Sam shrugged. "Languages are easy for me."

 

"What do you speak?"

 

"I can speak Latin, Spanish, and Greek. I can read all of those plus French, Romanian, Portuguese, a bit of Chinese, some Japanese, and German." Sam grinned at the look on Schuester's face. "Like I said, languages are easy for me. When I was a kid, my brother had to beg me to get my nose out of some text and play with him." Dean had, too. Sam hadn't known all of those languages at fourteen - he could only speak fluent church Latin, broken street Spanish, and English the first time around - but he certainly knew them at twenty-eight. "So the whole foreign-language-requirement thing is a bit redundant for me, I'm afraid."

 

"How did you learn all of that?" Schuester asked.

 

Sam shrugged. "We moved a lot when I was younger, and we never stayed anywhere long enough for me to make friends, so it was pretty much me, my brother, my dad, and books. Dad had books in Latin and Spanish, and one of them had snippets from just about everywhere. I ran out of things to read pretty fast, so I started on what he had. A family friend was a pastor, so I got good at church Latin, and from there I learned common Latin. Spanish is a romance language, so things just came together for me. I still have parts of Dad's books memorized, and I haven't seen them in - man, must be going on four or five years now."

 

The look on Schuester's face made him wish he'd censored that last bit, especially when the man said, "How old were you when you started learning?"

 

"I'm not sure. I could read English, so I was at least five, but I had enough time to learn it before he died when I was twelve, so I guess I was probably six or seven. There isn't much else to do on thirty-hour car trips. Or in a week-long stay at a chapel." Sam scratched his ear. "Dad wasn't too thrilled with me when I learned how to swear, though. That's when he started forcing me to take breaks." Dad had actually been amused to no end when Sam had learned how to swear, and Dean had laughed his head off at the look on the face of the kid Sam had yelled at. They'd had to leave pretty soon after, both because there was another job and because people started thinking they were Satanists, but it was a pretty good memory anyway.

 

"Do you have anything going on after school today?" Schuester asked.

 

Sam shook his head. "I start work at five, but I'm free until then."

 

"How about you take a proficiency test, then," he suggested. "Come by the choir room - I run glee club - and when you pass I can exempt you from the language requirement."

 

"Thanks," Sam said, "I'll do that. I should probably go see Ms. Pillsbury about scheduling again, but thank you."  
 

"Not a problem, Sam," Schuester said with an easy smile. "I'll see you this afternoon right after school."

 

"See you then," Sam confirmed, and went back to Pillsbury.

 

"Here's your schedule, Sam," she said, handing over a piece of paper. "Oh, and I forgot earlier, but Principal Figgins has decided that all students must take at least one extracurricular this year."

 

"Wouldn't that make them curricular?" Sam asked facetiously.

 

Pillsbury smiled tightly. "I have a list of everything offered. What do you like to do?"

 

"Not athletics," Sam said quickly. "It's a little late for tryouts, anyway. What does that leave?"

 

"Um...Celibacy Club, a few religious organizations, knitting, and glee. I would suggest theater, but Mr. Krazinski has made it known he's full up on actors and stage crew."

 

Sam stared at her incredulously. "That's it? Religion, knitting, or singing?" When she nodded, Sam groaned. "Singing it is." Schuester was in charge of glee anyway, and Sam was sure he could talk the man into letting him skip. It wasn't like he could sing or dance well.

 

"Wonderful! I'll let him know to expect you," Pillsbury said happily. "You'd better get going, you only have about ten minutes until the bell rings."

 

Sam nodded and stood, swinging his knapsack over his shoulder. "Thanks for everything, Miss Pillsbury."

 

"Not a problem, Sam." She smiled up at him, her brown eyes twinkling, and Sam left.

 

His first class, English, made him realize how out of practice he was at the whole 'school' thing. They were reading the second act of _Romeo and Juliet_ , and Sam, who had managed to avoid Shakespeare through high school and Stanford both, was totally lost. He knew the basic premise - girl meets boy, family drama, double suicide, family reconciliation - but he was lost beyond that.

 

_Who the fuck is Mercutio?_ he wondered, listening to the teacher rave about him.

 

When class ended, he slipped out and made his way to chemistry. His teacher seemed nice enough when he walked in, grabbing his attention with a giant wave. "I'm Mr. Reston," he said cheerfully when Sam was standing in front of his desk. "You must be Sam Winchester. Welcome to the class. I'm going to pair you up with Artie Abrams, okay? He sits in the back right. Let me grab you a textbook. Class!" he called loudly. The few people in the room turned to look. "This is Sam. He's new. Come say hi." Reston vanished into the storage room behind his desk.

 

Unsurprisingly, nobody came to introduce themselves. Sam tried really, really hard not to let that bother him; he was almost thirty, after all, he didn't care what a bunch of high school kids thought of him. Besides, he'd been the new kid enough times to know nobody wanted to get to know him until they saw who liked or disliked him.

 

Reston passed him the book with a smile. "Back right, Sam. We'll start soon."

 

Sam nodded and went to the table, flipping open the front cover of the book to write his name neatly inside. He observed the milling students, wondering which one was Artie.

 

None of them, he soon found out when a skinny boy in a wheelchair rolled up next to him. "Think you're in the wrong place, dude," he told Sam.

 

Sam answered, "Only if you're not Artie Abrams."

 

"I'm Artie."

 

"Oh, good, I was worried for a minute I'd screwed up 'sit at the back right table'." Sam smiled at him. "Sam Winchester. I just moved here."

 

"I figured," Artie said. "If you'd gone here for a while, we wouldn't be talking."

 

Sam raised his eyebrows and tried not to laugh. "You're bad news, is that it?"

 

"Dude, I'm crippled. People are gonna give you hell for talking to me."

 

Sam blinked, losing the smile. "What?"

 

"Did you miss the wheelchair? I know it's pretty inconspicuous, but still."

 

"No, I got the wheelchair part," Sam said impatiently. "I was more confused about catching hell for talking to you."

 

"Oh, come on, I'm sure it was that way at your old school."

 

"Homeschooled," Sam told him. "So how about you explain to me why talking to you is a bad idea? Small words, please." He grinned, making sure Artie knew the joke wasn't on him.

 

He rolled his eyes anyway. "I'm not normal. Not normal is bad. Bad means I get picked on a lot. Talk to me and you'll get picked on, too."

 

Sam blinked, confused. "Wait. People give you a hard time for being in a wheelchair?"

 

"Duh."

 

"Well, fuck that noise," Sam said. "Unless you try to kill me, man, I don't give a shit what you use to get around. Walk on your elbows, for all I care. Just make sure to get a picture, because that would be hilarious."

 

"Uh," Artie said. "Can't say that's a reaction I've ever gotten."

 

Sam frowned. "Can't say I've ever been somewhere where being in a wheelchair means you're a target."

 

Artie shrugged. "Welcome to Lima."

 

Reston called the class to order then, and they both had to be quiet and take notes. It didn't take Sam even five minutes to realize he was basically lost. He poked Artie's shoulder. "What the hell is an orbital?" he whispered.

 

Artie gave him a wide-eyed look and didn't answer.

 

When the bell rang and they were dismissed, Artie looked at him. "How much chemistry have you had?"

 

Sam shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I just got in here because it sounded better than earth science."

 

Artie shook his head in disbelief. "What's your next class?"

 

"PE," Sam answered. "I should probably get going - do we have to dress out?"

 

"Yep."  
 

"Joy," Sam mumbled. "I should get going. See you later, okay?"

 

"Yeah, sure," Artie said, giving him a small, sad smile.

 

PE was boring. They were in the middle of prepping for some big national fitness test, so they were running laps and doing random exercises all period. Tanaka didn't seem to care too much what they did. Sam paced himself to do slightly less well than the top few boys in his class, years of doing his best to not stand out kicking in. The only thing worse than a new kid was a new kid who was better at something than everyone else.

 

His first problem of the day came in the locker room. "Stop staring at my ass, Winchester!" someone yelled.

 

Sam finished pulling his shirt over his head. "What?"

 

"No fags in the locker room," someone else called.

 

"Enough!" Tanaka's rough voice boomed over them. "I hear language like that again you will be running laps for the entire next class period!"

 

So Tanaka, at least, had the bullies in hand, and Sam had a problem that hadn't even occurred to him.

 

He knew he wasn't gay. He knew he didn't care if someone else was. But he also knew there was no way he could convince anyone else of that, especially since he was planning on avoiding the dating scene like the plague - he may be in a teenager's body, but he was still twice the age of high school girls. Just being in the same room with them for so long made him feel like a grade-A perv.

 

He slammed his locker shut and clicked the combination lock closed. It wouldn't deter anyone determined to get in and knew how to pick locks, but it would stop the average bored high-schooler from getting at his clothes, including the uniform he'd had to shell out twenty bucks for despite convincing Tanaka to let him wear his own sweatpants instead of the regulation shorts once Sam had shown him his badly-scarred legs. He hoisted his knapsack over his shoulder and turned to leave.

 

_Dean_. The thought slammed into him out of nowhere, and he swallowed harshly to shove back the threatening tears. The first time Dean had died for a while, he'd thrown himself into hunting the trickster. The second time, he'd started the apocalypse. This was the third time Dean had died on him and stayed dead for longer than a few minutes, and he almost wished it would get easier with practice.

 

This was the worst one, though, because Sam had been there every step of the way, happily helping him on the path to self-destruction and ultimately unable to protect him. Sam was pretty sure he was dead at this point, since otherwise they would have seen each other. Before Adam was taken by Michael, he'd told Sam that Zachariah had described his relationship with Dean as 'psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent'. The shrink back in Oklahoma had called them codependent. Hell, even Bobby had made fun of their codependency. Sam was sure that's what they were, and he was equally sure that that was what their job required. It made it a whole lot harder to deal with his death, though; every morning since he'd gotten the apartment, he'd woken up with a cheerful greeting on his lips to annoy his brother - only to remember his brother wasn't there.

 

And he was a teenager again, with hormones throwing him every which way, trying to keep himself fed and clothed and up on the rent and unnoticed. He'd found himself fighting wild mood swings already that day, swinging from angry to sad to happy again with no clear triggers. With the clarity of an adult mindset, he wondered how most people made it through puberty without killing somebody. At least he had had hunting to work off his aggression the first time around.

 

That was another thing. The anger he'd stuffed into a little box for most of his life had roared through his veins, leaving him breathless and clenching his fists in an effort to keep himself under control, for almost two days. Garth had let him work off the edge of it, sparring good-naturedly until Sam could control himself again.

 

_It just isn't fair_ , he fumed silently, moving through the halls, and almost smiled at the naivete embodied in the thought. Thirty years of deaths and resurrections and apocalypses and dimensional rifts and time travel had taught him something very important: to a Winchester, life was never fair.


	2. Fighter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second half of Sam's day.

Sam surveyed the lunch room carefully. This was something he remembered, something that was familiar. Choosing a lunch table was important when you were the new kid. His eyes skipped around, searching for an empty table, or a table that looked like it held nice people.

"Sam!" Kurt was suddenly at his elbow.

"Hello, Kurt."

"Hey! So, I don't know if you met anyone else, but do you want to sit with us?" Kurt looked so happy, so eager, that Sam's lips curled into a smile he didn't have to force.

"I'd like that."

"Great!" Kurt took off, bobbing and weaving through the crowds, and Sam did his best to follow him. He stopped abruptly next to a table with two girls, one black and one Asian. "Mercedes, Tina, this is Sam. He's new. Sam, this wonderful diva" - the large black girl smiled at him with glossy lips - "is Mercedes. The lovely young woman next to her is Tina." The Asian grinned at him.

"Pleased to meet you," Tina said.

"Same," Sam said back, plastering on yet another smile.

"So what classes do you have?" Kurt asked. "You didn't have it figured out last time I saw you."

"Uh, English, history, calc two, gym, and chemistry."

"You have a free period?" Mercedes sounded a little suspicious.

"It was supposed to be Spanish, but I'm fluent, so Schuester said I could take a test this afternoon and he'll exempt me from the language requirement if I pass."

"Cool," Tina said. "So how do you know Kurt?"

Sam glanced over the boy in question. "A friend of mine is his second cousin twice removed, or something like that, and I got a job in his dad's garage."

"Huh. So you're new? Where are you from?"

"Kansas, originally, but I moved a lot." Sam brushed his hair back from his eyes and belatedly realized he hadn't even gotten his lunch out yet. He pulled out the bag - fifty cents at Goodwill, cheaper than a package of the brown paper kind that always fell apart within an hour - and unzipped the compartment, pulling out a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of water.

"Do your parents move a lot for work?"

Sam swallowed the mouthful of peanut butter before he answered, "My dad did, yeah, and when he died my brother and I kept up the business. So what's it like around here? My lab partner says there's a lot of people who pick on him. Anyone I should worry about?"

"Who's your lab partner?" Kurt asked.

"Guy named Artie Abrams. You know him?"

"Yeah, he's in glee club with us."

"You're in glee?" Sam felt more pleased than he was quite willing to admit. "Pillsbury said I needed an extracurricular, so I ended up in there."

"We're all in glee, boy," Mercedes told him, and Sam had a strange moment of disconnect at the thought of a teenager calling him _boy._

"Good to know," he said. "So, seriously, who do I need to look out for?"

The lunch period passed quickly, with Kurt, Mercedes, and Tina warning him off the football players and cheerleaders - who were, for some bizarre reason, known as _Cheerios_ \- before talk turned to gossip about people Sam had yet to meet. He listened with one ear, knowing it was usually helpful to have details to match with faces.

"Who do you have next, Sam?" Kurt asked.

"Study hall," Sam answered. "You?"

"We all have study hall after lunch," Tina told him. "He wants to know who you have it with."

"Uh…" Sam pulled his schedule from his pocket and unfolded it. "Sylvester, Sue."

"Ouch," Mercedes said. "I didn't even know she _took_ a study hall."

"Be careful with her," Kurt warned. "Don't poke a sleeping bear."

Sam raised his eyebrows. "That bad?"

"The entire school's terrified of her. The way she behaves, you'd think she was a demon," Mercedes complained.

"Really," Sam said lightly, even as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He had holy water and the knife, but he'd really rather not add a demon-possessed teacher to his growing list of problems.

"She's not," Kurt muttered to him. "I checked. Christo, right?"

"Right," Sam muttered back. It was strange, having someone know about demons without being in the life. "You're sure?"

"Positive." The bell rang just then, and the four of them stood. "Have fun with Coach Sylvester."

"I'll try," Sam answered dryly.

***

Sue Sylvester turned out to be a tall, thin woman in her early fifties. She strode into the auxiliary gym in an emerald-green tracksuit, her blue eyes sweeping over the eleven of them with a glance. "I see we have a new meatbag in our midst," she sneered.

Sam blinked. He was used to hearing 'meatsuit'.

"What's your name?"

"Sam Winchester," he answered.

"Sam Winchester? Isn't that the name of that serial killer that died a couple months ago?" Her voice was sarcastic.

Sam swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."

"So what brings you to the rotting streets of this town?"

"Friend of mine told me he could find me work up here," Sam answered.

"Are your parents too lazy to work themselves?" she sneered.

Sam's anger flared. "My parents are _dead_ ," he said sharply, feeling a vicious stab of pleasure at the look on her face.

She left him alone after that, and he spent the rest of the half-hour block reading through his chemistry text.

***

Calculus was a complete and utter failure.

When Sam had signed up for it, he'd done so on the assumption that he would remember most of what he'd learned the last time he'd taken the class. But he had been a freshman in college then, so it was going on ten years - _ten years_ , Jesus Christ, when had he gotten so old? And even that was ignoring the time he'd done in Hell - since he'd looked at anything even tangentially involving math more complicated than basic geometry.

 _Use it or lose it_ , he thought bitterly, trying to remember the integral of 1/x.

History was better, but not by much. They were on early American expansionism. Sam remembered writing papers on the topic, was pretty sure he'd written thirteen pages once, but it was a blur. He barely remembered anything from the class and had to outright bite his tongue to keep from speaking when the teacher got to the Donner party. He doubted anyone in the school would be happy to hear about wendigoes.

At long last, 2:30 rolled around; with it came Sam's free period. He spent it in the library, reading _Romeo and Juliet_ through the second act before scowling down at his calculus textbook, trying to make sense out of it all. The problem, he knew, was a mix of too-high expectations and burnout.

Sam was tired. He was tired, and sad, and depressed, and in the middle of what psychology books called 'major life changes'. He'd been so busy moving and job-hunting and finding an apartment complex that would rent to a sixteen-year-old (who was actually fourteen or twenty-nine or over two hundred, depending on who was doing the counting) and starting school and putting on his game face that he hadn't even started what well-meaning people who knew fuck-all about his relationship with Dean called 'the grieving process'.

Sam didn't handle grief well, that much he knew. When his father died, he'd drunk himself into a stupor and picked stupid fights with Dean. When Dean died the first hundred and one times - yes, Sam had counted them all, had vivid memories of Dean getting hit by an arrow shot by the waitress practicing in the lot behind the diner, of Dean getting flattened by a desk, of Dean getting mauled by a dog they'd passed every day for a month without incident - he'd gotten OCD and obsessive, much the way he'd been when he was soulless. The next time Dean died, he'd lost himself in drink, drugs, sex, and an addiction that sparked the Apocalypse. Sam wasn't built to live without Dean, that was all there was to it, and even his teenaged self had known it. That was part of why he'd left for Stanford, because he was so damn dependent on Dean it had scared him, and it had kept on scaring him since then except his need had outweighed the fear and he was in too deep to even consider leaving.

He buried his head in his hands and tried to take a deep breath. He needed to put off the grieving shit until he got back to the apartment. The bell rang, his book went back into his bag, and he left the library for the choir room.

***

Apparently, the week's lesson was classic rock, because the universe hated Sam just that much.

Okay, so he deserved it. He'd pretty much singlehandedly caused the end of the world. He'd drunk demon blood. He'd killed angels, defeated gods, de-ringed horsemen, stopped the Apocalypse (and he still wasn't quite sure if that counted for or against him, but he was pretty sure he'd pissed off the entirety of Heaven and Hell somewhere between killing Lilith and beating Lucifer), started a civil war in Heaven by dragging Michael down into Lucifer's Cage, let a desperate friend open Purgatory and release the only creatures that could kill angels without one of their swords, and failed to protect the Winchester the angels liked. All in all, he'd done enough in just three years to pretty much guarantee a spot on the universe's Shit List whether the universe was a vague, nebulous concept or an actual entity .

But ending up in Glee Club the same day the members were supposed to sing songs from his brother's tape collection four days after he died was cold, even by Winchester standards. That Dean was dead was something Sam knew with a cold certainty; four days was too long for Dean to just be lost.

 _Hold the grieving shit until you get back to the apartment,_ he told himself again, taking a deep breath and writing out a paragraph.

He handed the test to Schuester when he was done, smiling when the man grinned at him. "Go take a seat," Schuester told him.

"Take a seat?" a brunette with an annoyingly shrill voice parroted. "But - I thought -"

"Sam's going to be joining us," Schuester told them. "Sam, why don't you tell us a little about yourself?"

"Not much to tell," Sam said. "I, uh, I guess the most interesting thing about me is I'm working at Kurt's dad's garage."

"What do your parents do?" a husky boy Sam had heard called 'Fin' asked.

"They, uh, they're dead," Sam said. "Died a while ago. My brother died recently, and I ended up here."

"Do you have family here?" the shrill brunette asked.

Sam shook his head. "Just me. Found an apartment, got myself enrolled here, got a job. Got told I had to join an extracurricular, so here I am."

"Can you sing or dance?" the brunette pushed.

"I'm okay at singing," Sam answered. "Never tried dancing."

"But you can fight," Kurt pointed out unexpectedly. "That'll probably help you some."

"You can fight?" a guy with a mohawk asked. "How'd Hummel know that?"

Sam shrugged self-consciously. "A relative of his is a friend of mine," he said vaguely. "He's actually the one that suggested I look for work around here. The friend knows my dad was an ex-marine. When my mom got killed, Dad made sure we knew how to defend ourselves."

Nobody quite knew what to say to that.  
***  
"Nice car," someone called out to him when Sam climbed out in front of his apartment building. He glanced up to see a half dozen young men walking toward him with shit-eating grins on their faces. They were dressed like typical punks, baggy clothes and backwards hats, all of them wearing some combination of red and black.

"Thanks," Sam called back cautiously.

"Mind if we borrow it?" The grins got wider.

"Yes, actually," Sam said mildly.

The person in front - Sam guessed he was the leader - looked surprised. "Why not, man? We can fuck you up!"

Sam had to laugh. "I'd love to see you try." The sad thing, he realized, was that he really would like an excuse to hurt these guys.

They stopped walking and just stared at him. They were maybe ten feet away now, the Impala still between them. "Hey, man, you crazy or something? Don't fuck with us."

Sam smiled ferally, showing teeth. "Then don't fuck with me." He knew how to play this. Make himself seem dangerous, dangerous enough they wouldn't mess with him, and he'd be good. Screw it up, make himself look weak, and he was toast.

The problem, of course, was that he was five-six and wiry. It was much easier to be intimidating when he was six-four and corded with muscle.

"I think we will," the leader said, grinning and pulling a knife.

Sam pulled his own and walked around the car, putting his back to a Pinto that had seen better days. "Your funeral. Let's just try not to scratch the paint on my car." _She's all I have._

They were on him then, and Sam struck out hard and fast, focusing on getting rid of the knife. As soon as that went flying, he tucked away his own and gave as good as he got with fists and feet, putting his destroyed codependency and years of training into every blow.

One by one, they fell. The first, their leader, dropped from a blow to the spine, not enough to cripple but enough to hurt. The second and third had their heads smashed together. The fourth backed away when Sam broke his arm. The fifth had his knee dislocated. Sam choked out the sixth one.

He looked at numbers four and five, who were gray with pain. "Am I going to have problems with you again?" he asked calmly.

"No," the guy with the broken arm squeaked.

"Good," Sam said. "And if anything happens to my car while it's out here, I will hold your little gang" - he put enough scorn into the words to make it clear he thought of them as anything but - "personally responsible. And believe me, you got off easy today."

"Easy? Look what you did to us," Dislocated Knee snapped.

Sam had crossed the four feet to where he was laying and had a knife to his throat in under a second. "I could do worse," he said softly, making eye contact. "I've taken down things more dangerous than six people untrained in combat." He slid the knife just slightly inward, making a tiny little cut. He collected the drop of blood on the tip of the blade and showed it to the man on the ground. "Did you even feel me slice into your throat?"

The guy shook his head, wide-eyed. Sam smiled. "That's how sharp this knife is. I have more. So I'll say it again: Don't fuck with me, and don't fuck with my car, and this doesn't have to end in blood." He wiped the knife off on the man's shirt and stood, momentarily thrown by the lack of creaking in his knees. "Now, I am going into my apartment. You should probably go before people start to wonder how someone like me took out all of you. If you screw with me again, they will never find your bodies."

Sam pulled his backpack from the passenger seat and went into the apartment, collapsing onto his bed without bothering to take his shoes off. Curling into the fetal position, he shook and cried from adrenaline comedown and grief until he dropped into an exhausted sleep plagued by nightmares of bloody lights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Badass Sammy is really fun to write. Let me know what you think!


	3. Grand Theft Autumn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel may have fixed the hallucinations, but he couldn't fix everything.

He woke gasping early the next morning, heart pounding from the dream of Lucifer holding Dean and whispering, _Come back, Sam. You know what I'll do to him._

"Just a dream," he whispered to himself. "Just a dream, just a dream, just a dream." The sound grounded him. Dean was dead, and there hadn't been any demons nearby, so the angels had taken him. The Righteous Man was in Heaven, reliving his mother's cooking and the time he spent with Lisa and Ben. Sam had to remember that. _Dean's happy,_ he told himself. _Bored, maybe, but happy._ And wasn't that what really counted? Dean deserved happiness after everything he'd put up with.

Sam rolled out of bed and got dressed for a run. Thinking about Dean almost guaranteed Sam would be heading down to Hell sooner than intended.

It was early, the city grey in the light of false dawn, and Sam saw very few people on the path he took. He ran until he saw the sky lighten from a murky gray to yellows and lavenders, saw the sun come up over the horizon, and then turned back for his apartment. The burn in his legs reminded him his adult stamina hadn't carried over, even if his scars had.

He mulled that over on the way back. Why _had_ his scars stayed? It didn't make sense. Everything he'd read about transmutation indicated he should have the exact same body he did at fourteen, but his tattoos and scars had followed him. If his body had merely shrunk, Sam would have expected to keep his stamina, but that hadn't followed him, either. He didn't understand it, and unfortunately, there were no texts on Leviathan or even Purgatory to consult.

When he stripped to take a shower, he caught sight of his back for the first time. There was the thick scar from the knife wound, the round one from a bullet, the jagged one where he'd had a compound fracture of a rib. But there were more, ones that he didn't recognize, and his hair stood up on end.

_Cage._ That was the only way to explain the lash marks and burn scars and remnants of frostbite. But why only on his back? Why were they appearing at all, when it was only his soul that had been trapped?

He turned the water on as hot as it would go, wanting nothing more than to purge the remembered ice from his veins. Cas had done what he could, had made it so Sam was no longer seeing things, but he could only do so much. Sam still found it hard, sometimes, when there was an unexpected flame or if he grabbed something he didn't realize was cold, to know that he was out of Lucifer's grasp. To look at the handle in front of his hips without seeing the ball of energy that sank into his veins and turned his blood to slush, and when he was completely frozen, heat until he was boiling and there was blood vapor coming out of his pores.

Cas had fixed him, but he was still broken, and now he didn't even have Dean to keep the tape from peeling away.

He shuddered and turned the heat up. As awful as boiling had been, it happened far more rarely than freezing had. He soaped his body, washing away the sweat from his ten-mile run, and tried to relax under the spray.

He froze when he caught sight of his arms. Words. Hebrew and Latin and Enochian and Aramaic words, carved into his flesh and scarred over. _Fuck. Cage._

Shit, what time was it? He'd completely forgotten about school. His mind worked furiously as he rinsed the lather out of his hair. Sunrise in September, that was what, seven? Then a half hour back, made it seven-thirty. Plus the time spent examining his back and not getting lost in his own head, that was another half hour, easy. School started at eight-thirty, it was a twenty-minute drive, and Sam was still in the shower.

"Shit," he said, jumping out and drying hurriedly. Being late on his second day was a good way to draw bad attention to himself. He stumbled out of the bathroom still wet, pulling his shirt on as he made his way to the kitchen. He knocked against the wall twice and growled a curse. Autobrewed coffee went into a travel mug, his lunch was on the counter, and the clock on the microwave said seven-forty-five.

"Huh," he said aloud, feeling his panic begin to subside. "Guess sunrise was earlier than I thought." He wasn't entirely sure why he was talking out loud; maybe he just wanted to break the quiet of an empty apartment. He'd never been alone before, he'd always had Dean or a roommate.

He shook his head, neatly closing the door on the dark thoughts brewing in his mind. "Save it for later, Sam," he told himself, pouring himself a cup of coffee in a mug that screamed, "Break Fluid" in neon green bubble letters on an orange background. He'd grabbed it with a thought of Dean's face if he ever saw it. Dean always had liked bad puns, and bad puns involving cars and caffeine were the best.

And, he had to admit, the color scheme was hilarious.

With a full cup of coffee running through his veins, Sam shifted away from the counter. He needed to brush his hair and teeth.  
***  
The morning of his second day at school passed uneventfully. He found Finn in his English class, joked around with Artie in chemistry, kept his head down in PE, and sat lunch with Kurt, Tina, and Mercedes. He didn't eat anything - one look at the sandwich he'd made and his stomach tried to revolt - but it was nice to have people to sit with. It wasn't until he was on his way to study hall that anything remotely interesting happened, and then he was busy choking down his rage before he killed someone.

He'd just been walking down the hall, avoiding the mass of people seeming determined to block his path, when three broad expanses of red polyester filled his view shortly before blue slushy replaced it.

_Cold, fuck, cold, he's here, he's here, what - please - no, please, no, stop - cold, please,_ please _, just stop, please, anything_ -

"What the fuck?" he snarled, the ringing in his ears a mix of blind panic and the laughter surrounding him. He reached up and cleared his eyes _See you're not there you can move your hands_ to see three jocks laughing.

"Welcome to the school," the one in the middle sneered.

Sam almost rose to the bait, but restrained himself. _They didn't hurt you_ , he told himself. _Just let it be._ These weren't gang members out to steal his car, just assholes out to make themselves feel better. If things kept happening, then Sam would step up, but until then, he would take comfort in knowing that he could wipe the floor with them if he needed to. In the meantime, he'd just need to keep his head down. 

The jocks pushed around him, smirking, and Sam waited until he had himself under control _You're not there you're in Lima you're in Ohio you have a shitty apartment your name is Sam Winchester you're on Earth just calm down these are just kids_ to make his way to the bathroom to clean himself up. At least he was wearing dark colors, a habit he'd picked up when he was still a kid because his clothes tended to get stained with blood and monster drippings, so the blue wouldn't stand out.

It took longer to get clean than he'd thought it would, especially since he still had Lucifer's sneer ringing in his ears, and he didn't manage to get out of the bathroom until the bell was ringing for the end of study hall. _Looks like I've skipped my first class,_ he reflected uneasily. Not like it really mattered; it wasn't like he was actually a teenager.

Calculus was annoying. With the fight and the grief of the night before, Sam had forgotten to do the previous night's homework, and was chewed out thoroughly for the offense. He couldn't even defend himself without admitting he'd gotten involved in gang problems.

When his free period came around, Sam slipped over to Mr. Schuester's room. "Hey, Mr. Schuester. Got a minute?" he asked.

"Sam! Of course. What's up?" Schuester smiled at him.

"I was wondering if you'd gotten around to grading the test yet," Sam told him.

"Yes! I did." He rifled through the papers on his desk and pulled out the packet Sam had filled out. "You did very well. I'm going to turn in the exemption paperwork to Ms. Pillsbury this afternoon."

"Thank you," Sam said, shifting his backpack uncomfortably.

"Have a good day, Sam. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Sam echoed, turning and walking away.  
***  
His shift in the garage went more smoothly than anything else in his life had recently. Routine oil changes and engine checks kept him busy for the entire time; Burt had left him alone once he saw Sam knew what he was doing. Kurt worked next to him. They didn't talk much, beyond Kurt complimenting the Impala, but they really didn't need to speak. When Sam left the garage, he was covered in grease stains and aching slightly from overusing muscles that weren't developed as much as he was used to them being.

He went for a run when he got back to the apartment. It was late, closing in on dusk, but Sam needed the movement. He made sure he had a knife strapped to his left forearm and one tucked at the small of his back before he headed out.

He ran close to five miles, looping around so he didn't backtrack, before he made it back to his apartment, where he sucked down a glass of water before he took a shower, did his homework, and fell into bed.

The next day, Friday, dawned rainy and miserable. The newly-formed scars on Sam's back ached, his bones hurt like they were stretching out - growing pains were something Sam had had to deal with as a teen the first time around, and it seemed like the second time wasn't going to be any better - and his legs throbbed to remind him he'd pushed himself too far in his run yesterday. Sam wanted nothing more than to lay in bed and wallow in misery or, better, keep his mind carefully blank.

_I'll do that on Sunday,_ he told himself. _No school or work on Sunday. Maybe I'll find a hunt today, go kill something._ He smiled grimly. He was more like Dean and his father than he thought, if the idea of killing something comforted him.

School was boring. He managed to choke down half of his peanut butter sandwich during lunch before he had to stop - and why his body had decided food was the enemy, he had no idea - and spent his free period in the library once more. If he hadn't had Glee that afternoon he would have just cut out and gone to the garage to start his shift early.

But he did have Glee, so at 3:30, he started the trek to the choir room.

He had to suffer through four more a cappella versions of his brother's favorite songs before Schuester cut them off and started talking about sectionals. Sam tried to pay attention, but all he picked up was something about a competition and choosing songs.

The shrill brunette - Rachel, Sam had learned her name was somewhere along the line, Rachel Berry - had an entire repertoire in her head. From the way the kids looked at each other and made faces, Sam figured this wasn't the first time she'd taken over. Sam actually flinched when she suggested doing a Metallica cover. It was hard enough hearing it - he didn't think he could actually participate. Luckily, Schuester shot her down.

They did, eventually, agree on two of their three songs: "Hallelujah" by Paramore and "Fly" By Nicki Minaj and Rihanna. They still needed a ballad, but they had time.

"Okay, that's about it! All that's left is this week's assignment." Schuester smiled gently at Sam. "This week's theme is…" He turned to the board and pulled a green marker out of the holder. "Grief. Everyone's lost somebody or something special. This is a paired assignment, but with Sam, we'll need one group of three."

"We'll get him, Mr. Schue," Finn said.

"And make that boy listen to Rachel all week?" That was one of the cheerleaders - Morello? Zappa? Lindsey? Some guitar player Dean had liked, anyway. "Hell no. Puck, you and Artie are taking him."

"Fine by me," Artie said with a nervous smile.

"Fantastic! Looks like we have our groups." Schuester beamed at them. "Fifteen minutes, talk it out. Figure out what song you're doing."

Sam slid over to sit by Artie, leaned in, and whispered, "Which one's Puck, again? And is that really his name?"

Artie started laughing. "The one with the mohawk," he whispered back between giggles. "And his name's technically Noah Puckerman, but he prefers Puck."

Sam nodded and straightened up in his seat, wondering absently why Artie laughed at everything he said. "So. Got any songs?" If he was being sardonic, nobody else would ever know.

"There's a song by Jimmy Eat World," Artie suggested as Puck sat down in front of Sam. "Hear You Me?"

Sam frowned. "Is that the one - down sleepless roads the sleepless go, may angels lead you in?"

"Yeah, you know it?" Artie asked eagerly.

"I heard it a while ago," Sam said. "I only remember it because it wasn't the mullet rock my brother liked."

"That's a pussy song," Puck said. "What about Carnival of Souls?"

"Don't think I've heard that one," Sam said.

"It's great," Puck told him, pulling out an MP3 player. "Here, listen." He handed Sam and Artie each a headphone.

They listened all the way through. "I like that," Sam said. He wasn't sure it would translate well to glee club, but there were probably worse songs to try to convert.

"But is it really grief?" Artie asked.

"Maybe not," Puck admitted.

"No, it is," Sam said. "Maybe not grief in the sense Schuester meant, but grief in the sense of an old life being left behind and being unable to go back. Being left behind while everyone else moves on, being trapped in a position you hate - that's a type of grief all its own."

"Dude," Puck said, "is that a quote, or do you actually talk like that?"

Sam flushed. "Sorry. It's how I talk when I'm trying to explain something I don't really have words for."

"You have a point," Artie said. "I wouldn't have even thought about it like that."

"So we can do it?" Puck asked.

Sam almost laughed at the look on his face. "I don't have a problem with it."

"Looks like we're doing Carnival of Souls," Artie said.  
***  
That night, after he got back from the garage, Sam found a hunt. What was probably a black dog was killing people about ten miles north of Lima. Sam glanced at the clock. It was only eight; he didn't have to go in to the garage until noon on Saturday. He pulled on his coat and headed out.

It was one of the most boring hunts Sam had ever been on, including the ones he'd been on when he was ten and told to wait in the car the entire time; at least then he'd had schoolwork. This time he spent almost an hour in a blind before he shot and killed the stupid thing. He didn't even need to burn it, since it dissolved when it came into contact with consecrated iron. It took all of two hours from the time he left his apartment to the time he got back.

He was pissed when he got back. He'd been counting on the adrenaline rush to make him crash, but he hadn't even gotten his heart rate up. When he'd been on other unsatisfying hunts, he'd been able to drink until he was comfortably numb - not pass-out drunk, not stumbling happy drunk, but just drunk enough his problems didn't exist anymore - but at this point, he could barely pass for sixteen, let alone twenty-one. No one in the state would sell him booze.

So he went for a run instead, hoping - but not praying, never praying, fuck praying, he didn't think he'd ever pray again to the angels who had wanted him to destroy the world and let him burn for centuries as punishment for saving it instead - that the endorphins would kick in if he went far enough and fast enough. It was ten at night, and he didn’t live in the nicest part of town, but it didn't matter. If someone shot him, it wasn't like anyone would care.

He made it back to the apartment at one, and wasn't quite sure if he was happy that he hadn't been jumped.  
***  
He got to know Kurt a little better, working beside him on a Ford that had seen better days. It was obvious Kurt wanted to ask what happened to make him move to Lima, and it was just as obvious he didn't want to know. Even if he had, Sam wouldn't have told him. He had no desire to relive the past year.

When he casually mentioned a hunt he'd gone on the night before, Kurt banged his head on the underside of the Ford's hood. "You went on a hunt last night?" he squeaked. "There's stuff like that around here?"

"Yes, Kurt, I did. One of the most boring things I've ever done," Sam told him. "And stuff like that is everywhere. Last night was low-risk."

"What does that mean?" Kurt asked, fiddling with the alternator.

"It means the only way I could've gotten hurt is if I fell asleep out there," Sam told him, amused. "It wasn't anything too bad, but it got three people two nights ago, so I figured I'd take care of it."

"You took care of something that killed three people," Kurt said faintly. "And that's low-risk?"

Sam laughed hollowly. "I consider it low-risk. Rookies would consider it medium. The really green ones would call it high just because it had a body count." He grabbed a wrench from the bench beside them and leaned in. "Didn't get a scratch on me. Which reminds me. Is throwing slushies at people a time-honored tradition at McKinley, or am I the only one to have received the honor?"

"You got slushied?" Kurt asked. "Oh, I'm sorry. It happens all the time."

"And nobody does anything?" Sam asked.

"It's the least of what they do. It's harmless."

Sam's blood ran cold. "When you say the least…" he said slowly, looking at the engine in front of him.

"Hate to break it to ya, but this isn't exactly San Francisco and I'm not exactly Mr. T," Kurt snorted. "They're just homophobic bullies."

"They ever give you any real trouble?"

"Why? You gonna beat them up for me?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of teaching you to defend yourself, but I could do that." Sam grinned at him. "It's been a week since I last fought for my life, I'm getting bored."

Kurt laughed. "You're horrible."

"But honest," Sam said, and swallowed. "Dean and Cas, a friend of ours, they died in that fight." He kept his eyes firmly on the engine.

"Oh," Kurt said quietly. "Dean went out fighting."

"We used to say together or not at all," Sam whispered, eyes stinging. He swiped at them with the back of his left hand, the only part not covered in grease. "We killed more evil sons o' bitches than you could name. He went down a hunter, and there's no better death than that."

"Is that how you want to go?" It was Kurt's turn to focus on the car.

"Yeah," Sam said, "it really is. What about you?"

"Old and in bed, surrounded by family."

"Sounds nice," Sam said wistfully.

"So get out of hunting," Kurt suggested.

Sam's laugh had an edge of sadness. "It's not that easy, Kurt." He reached down to pull out a part he dimly recognized. "It's never that easy. So, seriously, self-defense. You interested?"

"Really? You'd do that?"

"Course."

"Then yes, Sam, I would be very interested."

Sam grinned. "Great. When do you want to start?"

That was how Sam found himself showing Kurt how to throw a punch during their break. Kurt kept trying to tuck his thumb inside, but all in all, it could have gone worse. They spent another hour on it after work before they left.

Sam managed to eat half a baked potato for dinner before his stomach cramped and rejected the food. It was still early, so he went for another run, and when he got back, he put himself through his paces with the knives and with the exercises he'd kept up with. Finally, after four hours, he was tired enough to sleep.

The next day, he didn't bother getting out of bed until almost four in the afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so! My personal headcanon - especially following the line "You're broken in ways I can't fix" - is that Cas fixed the hallucinations, but Sam's soul has yet to heal. Thus, flashbacks, OOC behavior, emotional upheaval, depression, etc. I'm not writing Sam with a specific mental illness; I don't have personal experience with anything but depression and anxiety and I don't like writing characters with emotional/mental/medical problems I've never experienced because it's too easy to screw up.
> 
> The first draft of this chapter had Karofsky and his buds getting beaten to a pulp, but I pulled myself back. I figure that Sam's learned to let things go unless they're seriously hurting him, which slushies aren't, because of the guilt he feels over the things he while addicted to demon blood/soulless. Badass Sammy only comes out when there's an actual threat, and frozen flavored water doesn't exactly make the cut.
> 
> Any theories as to why Sam's body changed the way it did? I'm curious to see if y'all have put it together yet. Also, do you want more action? Interpersonal drama? Emotional scenes/explicit description? (I've been trying make the internal monologue of missing Dean come out in actions rather than in lengthy paragraphs of angst.)
> 
> [This chapter title breaks pattern. Who can guess why?]


	4. Telephone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rumors fly

_** Warnings: explicit torture, implicit non-con (set off in italics, follows the bathroom scene) ** _

Monday. Run. Exercise. Coffee. Shower. Coffee. Dress. Drive. School.

Sam had done much more complicated tasks on autopilot before.

Sam had only been in this school for four days, but he could tell something was different. Girls whispered and giggled, eyes flicking over to him. Boys smirked openly. Every time he got close to a group of people, talk would abruptly cease and they would all stare at him, wide-eyed.

Sam remembered this. He remembered the hushed talk, the hidden grins, the open challenges. He remembered being slammed into lockers because he didn't want to fight back. He remembered having a target on his back.

Someone had started a rumor. From the looks of it, it was going to be bad. Sam guessed Karofsky or one of the other jocks would be the first to bring it up to him, and he was right. Someone in a letterman jacket called him 'fag' when he was on his way to homeroom. Sam ignored him.

That turned out to be the wrong way to handle it. Lack of response was taken as confirmation, and the rumor was now fact. He'd forgotten how thick teenagers were; they literally had to have things spelled out before they'd understand, and sometimes they still didn't get it.

Still, it didn't bother him; it wasn't the first time he'd been mistaken for gay. It didn't register on him how much trouble the rumor could cause until he went to the bathroom just before lunch and five guys cornered him.

"Don't think we want a fairy like this being around us in here, do we, guys," one of them sneered. Despite the phrasing, it wasn't a question.

"Don't think we do," another snapped, apparently unfamiliar with the nuances of speech.

"Back off," Sam warned. "I'm not what you think I am."

"You're not a fag, huh? Expect us to believe that?" That was the one on the far right.

"Yes, actually," Sam said calmly. "And I expect you to let me pass."

"Not gonna happen. Figure we need to teach you a lesson on looking at us," the one in the middle told him. _That must be the leader,_ Sam thought, ducking the punch thrown at him.

They were all on him then. They were older and larger than he was, and unlike the gang he'd put down they all attacked at once. He managed to drop two of them before the one on his left got in a lucky punch to the kidney and his knees folded under him.

That was a problem.

They shoved him down. He swore, kicking out and bucking wildly, but there were hands pinning his wrists over his head and a body straddling his hips. Punches landed; he felt his nose break, an eye swell, and a cut open on his forehead.

Sam was more flexible as a teenager than he had been as an adult, probably because his joints were still in good condition and there wasn't so much muscle getting in the way. He pulled his legs as close to his chest as they would go, locked his ankles around the throat of the one on top of him, and forced him to lean back or choke. When he was laying back, Sam kicked his face with the heel of his shoe. The whole process took all of three seconds, too fast for the third guy left standing to get involved.

Sam twisted and bucked and got a hand free. He punched upwards, blinded by blood and bruising, and got in a lucky hit. The guy who had been pinning his hands swore.

Sam was scared, and he didn't mind admitting it. He was hurt, functionally blind, in a body he wasn't used to fighting in, outnumbered, and outweighed. He didn’t even know if the three he'd dealt with were still down.

So he did the only sensible thing: he opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and screamed as loud as he possibly could.

A hand clamped over his jaw. "Shut it," one of them snarled. Sam found the wrist by feel and dug his nails in, hard enough to draw blood, and pirouetted to force the arm behind his attacker's back. He still couldn't see anything, so he screamed again, not daring to break his grip to wipe the blood from his eyes, and hoped someone would come. It would make the next time worse, but the next time he'd pull one of his knives, school rules be damned.

Leveling three of them and incapacitating another would just inspire them to bring more.

Right as he opened his mouth to scream again, he heard a semi-familiar voice. "What in the name of William McKinley is going on in here?"

Sam turned toward where he remembered the door was. "Sylvester?" he croaked through a throat he didn't remember getting bruised.

"Winchester," she said curtly. "Unhand him and tell me what happened."

"Got attacked," he managed, wiping some of the blood off his face and carefully avoiding his broken nose. "Defended myself."

"Myers?"

"We don't need fags in the bathroom," Myers spat. He must be the one Sam hadn't dealt with. "That's just gross."

"Not gay," Sam said.

"What's going on? I heard -" The new voice abruptly stopped.

Sam knew that voice. "Hi, Mr. Schuester," he said weakly.

"What happened here?" he gasped.

Sylvester was the one to answer. "Seems the mouth-breathers at this school thought Serial Killer here was gay and decided to do something about it. Where'd you learn to fight?"

"My dad was an ex-Marine," Sam said vaguely, reaching up to rub at his throat. "Hey - real quick - am I bleeding anywhere important? Can't see myself."

"Your nose and your forehead," Schuester told him. "What happened to the guys on the floor?"

"Uh." Sam had to think. "One of 'em went down when I hit his throat. One might've cracked his head. Don't know about the third one, must've happened after my eyes went out. Probably either choked him out or gave him a concussion."

"You took one down when you couldn’t see?" Sylvester sneered.

"Don't need to see when he's straddling me." Sam carefully wiped the bottom half of his face. The eye with blood in it was burning as tears started falling to clear his vision. _For someone who accused me of being gay, he sure liked that position,_ Sam thought sarcastically. "Got my legs around his throat and pulled him off."

"Fucking freak, nobody should be able to do that." Not Myers' voice, so that was the one he'd twisted the arm of. Sam blinked rapidly; his left eye was starting to get some vision back.

"We should go to Figgins," Schuester said.

"You take 'em," Sylvester said. "Send the nurse down to see if these three are going to live."

"Pretty sure I didn't kill them," Sam said, then mumbled, "Backpack was...dropped near the sinks, so…."

"I got it, Sam," Schuester said. Sam could hear the rustle of cloth as he moved around. "Can you see yet?"

"It's all just a blur of red," he answered, "but I can follow. You make noise when you walk."

"Can you two behave?"

Two surly "yeah"s from the boys still standing answered him, and they started the walk down to the office. Sam took inventory as he followed. Twinged knee, probable bruise where he'd gotten punched in the side, broken nose, cuts all over his face, blood-blinded eye, black eye, headache, ringing in his ears - concussion, then, a mild one since he wasn't too off-balance - and maybe a bruised rib. Sam had definitely been in better shape, but he'd also been in much worse.

They were about halfway there when the adrenaline crash hit. Shakes and shortness of breath combined with the pain reminded him far, far too much of everything he was trying to forget. If a slushie could trigger a minor flashback, pain definitely could, even if it was a different kind of pain than what he'd found in Lucifer's cage.

_Pain and blood and fear and fury and creativity, that's all that exists in Lucifer's domain._

_They'd gotten tired of straight torture after a long time, Sam doesn't know and doesn't care how much; no matter how many tools there are, an infinite amount of time guarantees boredom with them all. He is Lucifer's and Michael's only plaything, and they use him as one, taking out their frustrations and boredom and lust on him._

_Today is a mix of anger and lust, with the two of them on top of him, one choking him and the other splitting him apart, both of them drawing on his naked skin with knives. Swirling patterns of blood, red and glistening, most of which are words Sam would recognize if only he could see. Enochian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Arabic, all carved into his skin slowly and carefully, deep enough to hurt and bleed but not enough to do actual damage because the real fun is just beginning._

_His skin is marked._ Slut. Whore. Abomination. Property of Lucifer. Property of Michael. _Angry cuts over words where the archangels argue for ownership, and Sam would laugh if he could find it funny that Michael wants him._

_When his front is covered with writing, he is flipped onto his stomach and the knives press into him again. Lucifer cuts his hair off slowly, tenderly, crooning his name._

"Sam?"

_When he is bald, the knife is taken to his scalp. His neck. Michael is already working on his back and ass._

_Sam has learned to submit here. He may have overcome Lucifer through force of will, but physically (spiritually?), two archangels are more than enough to secure a human soul. It's easier to let them do what they want than it is to struggle against the inevitable._

_He's just glad Dean can't see how far he's fallen, even if Sam thinks Dean might understand. Dean broke, after all; if anyone can form a picture of his torment, it would be him._

_"Thinking of Dean," Lucifer whispered. Bad Sam. His form ripples and contracts, and suddenly it is his brother in his mouth and holding a knife._

"Sam!"

_Michael shifts behind him, and he has taken the form of John Winchester too often for Sam to not know what he feels like. He wonders, half-hysterically because there is no sanity to be found, if he should be freaking out more at knowing his father like this._

_It is not the worst they have done to him. It isn't even close._

"Sam, can you hear me?"

_They get bored, of course. They always do. Sam's never enough to satisfy them for long. The knives slowly leave the skin of his back, and Sam wants to beg for them to come back, because he knows what's next._

_The knives move to his hands and start slicing. Sam would scream if he could draw breath. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could lose consciousness._

"Sam, honey, I need you to come back now."

_The first to go are the tips of his middle fingers. Michael/John and Lucifer/Dean move together. This is a dance they know well. They're methodical, slicing into his fingers with even pressure, turning skin and bone to thin ribbon. And they talk, telling him everything he needs and hates to hear._

_"You deserve this," Michael/John tells him. "You arrogant, blind, foolish mud monkey. You deserve this."_

_"You tricked me, Sam." Lucifer/Dean sounds sad. Sam has learned to fear him more when he is like this than when he s in a blind rage, because when he gets like this he takes his time and plans. "I thought we were friends. I thought you were on board with this. But no, you lied to me. I never lied to you, Sam."_

"Sam? That's it, Sam, come on."

_"You hurt everyone you care about, you know that?" Lucifer/Dean's still got that damnable sadness going on behind his conversational tone, but his eyes give away his glee. "Madison. Jess. Mom. Dad. Me. Brady. Even your prom date. We were all hurt because of you. This is your penance, Sam."_

_Sam can't even deny it._

_"You let me out, Sam. You started this. Everything I did when I was walking around topside is your fault." The first time he'd told Sam that, Sam hadn't believed him, had made excuses for what he'd done. Now he knew better._

_"You didn't listen to us when we told you to stop," Michael/John rumbles. "You didn't listen, and then you and your brother failed."_

__Earth's still there, _Sam thinks._ We didn't fail at all. __

_"You think that? You, boy, think you know what failure is?" Michael/John snaps._

_The knives have moved on from his fingers and are now at his wrist. The smooth chops they've been making no longer work, and they have to saw back and forth like they're carving a cut of meat. It's close enough to what they're doing._

__"Sam. Sam, focus on me. Can you do that?" __

_He's lying in a pool of his own blood now. It's leaking from the words carved into his skin, from his mouth, from his dismembered arms. Lucifer/Dean carefully traces the skin around his eyes, not puncturing the actual organ, not yet._

"Come on, Sam, you can do it. Come on back to us."

_His attention snags on that voice. He knows that voice. It doesn't belong here, where there is pain and blood and fear and fury. He doesn't meet that voice for another few centuries. Why is it in with him?_

"Sam. Hey, Sam, good, that's it, focus on me."

_The pain surges again, and Sam struggles to remember what he was thinking of. The voice. It's still talking. He strains to hear what it's saying, trying to push the pain away from his mind so he can figure out what is happening._

"Good, Sam. You're doing very well. Can you tell me where you are?"

_My mouth is full, of course I can't! he wants to yell at her. Can't she see? Can't she hear?_

_The knives stop cutting when they reach his shoulders. Sam knows what happens next, and he isn't surprised when they stab into him. His back, his sides, his ass, all feel the deep bite as the blades plunge into delicate flesh._

"Sam. No, Sam, don't go back, I need you to stay here with me."

_Sam blinks, which is his first clue something is wrong, because his eyelids were cut off when he was reformed this last time. Lucifer wanted to see his eyes as they played._

"That's it, Sam, that's good. Stay with me."

_A hand is touching his wrist, how, how is that possible when it's in pieces at his side and all hands are accounted for on those knives?_

"Ow! Sam! You need to calm down."

_Calm down? Calm? He's being tortured and shredded and oh no (not oh God, never oh God, he made the mistake of saying that once and only once) here comes the whip, they're going to flog him again, maybe they'll flay him._

"Sam, deep breaths, okay? Breathe with me."

_The voice, he knows the voice, and he struggles to face it. Brown eyes. Red hair. Extremely modest clothes. School office. Guidance counselor?_

"Sam, I need you to calm down."

_Guidance counselor. Pillsbury. His life fades in, the cage fades out, his arms reattach, and he is surrounded by gray. He struggles to catch his breath._

"Good, Sam, that's very good. Breathe with me." 

Sam's good eye focused. He was in an office. Figgins', he realized. The man was watching him with a frown.

"S-Sor-Sorry," he managed, trying to catch his breath and slow his heart.

"It's okay, Sam. Do you know who we are?"

Sam blinked. "School. Pillsbury. Figgins."

"Good." Pillsbury's thumb stroked his wrist and he flinched. She pulled her hand back and squirted hand sanitizer. "Do you know who you are?"

"Yeah," he said, but didn't elaborate.

"You were pretty deep in your head there, Sam. Can you tell us what happened?"

 _Blood. Pain. Fire._ "Flashback."

"Flashback to what, Sam?"

Sam grimaced. "A couple years ago I was … taken. I never did find out what they wanted."

"What did they do to you?"

Sam shook his head. "Doesn't matter. It's over. Sorry for freaking out like that, it won't happen again."

"You can't control that," Pillsbury told him. "You really should talk about -"

Sam cut her off. "It's under control. That's the first time it's happened in two years. It's just stress and the blood in my eye. Speaking of which." He looked at Figgins, his left eye nearly clear of blood and his right swollen shut. "What did they tell you happened?"

"They tell me you came on to them in the bathroom and they felt threatened. What do you think happened?"

"They told me they didn't want a fag in the bathroom - their words, not mine, and I'm not gay anyway - and that they'd decided to take care of it. One of them threw the first punch. I defended myself."

"You left three people unconscious."

"And if they hadn't gotten in a punch to the kidney, they would all be down. I know how to fight. It's why I didn't take on Karofsky when he threw a slushy in my face last week."

"You didn't fight because you know how?"

Sam could tell Figgins was confused and groped for an analogy. "The difference in our skill levels - it would be like, I don't know, a Marine taking on a kindergartener. It didn't really hurt me, so I didn't want to hurt him. But today, there were five people bigger and stronger than I was who wanted to harm me."

"And that's why you screamed?" Pillsbury asked gently.

Sam shook his head and winced. His concussion might be mild, but it was still a concussion. "I didn't scream until the three of them were down - not until I was hurt, blind, and outnumbered. I wanted to take care of it myself. It'll be worse next time."

"You think there'll be a next time?" Pillsbury asked.

"There's always a next time," Sam said, sounding defeated.

"Well," Figgins said. "This is your first offense and they admitted to being at fault. You will serve detention three days this week, which can be replaced by an extracurricular."

"He's in Glee," Pillsbury said.

"Glee meets three days a week," Figgins said. "You will go. If you skip, you will serve regular detention. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Sam said.

"Good. Go to class."

"Um." Sam swallowed. "What time is it?"

"Just before one."

"I need to talk to you, Sam," Pillsbury said. "Why don't you come with me, and I'll write you a pass to give your teachers tomorrow, okay?"

Sam's mouth pressed into a thin line. "Fine."

He followed Pillsbury into a small room across from her office. The room's walls were solid, Sam was relieved to see, and not made of glass. 

"Are you sure you're okay, Sam?" Pillsbury asked. "I could call your parents to come get you if you want to go home."

"Emancipated minor," he reminded her. "My parents are dead."

"Right." She looked awkward for a minute. "So your brother disappeared last week? How are you handling that?"

"As well as you'd expect," Sam said bluntly.

"What are you doing, I mean," she said.

Sam shrugged and flinched as the movement pulled on bruises. "Running, mostly. I do five miles before school and ten miles after."

"Every day?" Pillsbury was definitely surprised.

"It helps me process," he said defensively. "And it helps me sleep."

"How have you been sleeping?"

"Poorly. But you knew that already, didn't you?"

"I guessed," she allowed. "Look, Sam, I'm not just a guidance counselor. I'm also the school psychologist, which means I'm bound by HIPAA. You're an emancipated minor. I legally can't tell anyone what you say to me. Even if I was allowed, I wouldn't. You can trust me, Sam. Tell me what's going on."

Sam looked away. "It's just - he was my brother, you know? He took care of me after Mom was killed and Dad started drinking, and he kept taking care of me after Dad died. He's the one who put me back together after - after." Sam swallowed. "And now he's dead."

"I thought he disappeared."

"He did," Sam said. "But it's been a week. If he was free, he would have found me by now, or called me. If someone had him, I would have gotten a ransom demand. He's dead." Sam fought to keep his voice level.

"You said he put you back together after, Sam. What did you mean by that?"

Sam closed his eyes. "I told you I was taken a few years ago. The thing is, I wasn't just taken. I was tortured. I remember it. I remember every moment of every day of every year I spent with them."

"How long?" Pillsbury interrupted. "How long did they have you?"

Sam choked on a sob. "I don't know. It was a long time. Long enough I forgot who I was, what I did, why I was there. All I remembered was that I had to get back to Dean and I was glad he wasn't with me. Dean's the one who found me, who got me out, and he kept me from freaking out too badly afterward. When I - when I couldn't handle it, he came to visit me in the hospital every day. Dean was everything."

Pillsbury was quiet for a moment. "Can I assume that if I refer you to a professional counselor, you won't go?"

Sam shook his head. "Can't afford it."

"Right." She took a deep breath. "Sam, can you tell me what they did to you?"

"What didn't they do would be a better question, Ms. Pillsbury," Sam said sadly. "You name it, they did it."

"Did they ever...touch you, Sam?"

Sam laughed bitterly. "Yeah. Every way you can think of and a few besides." He met her eyes grimly. "Ms. Pillsbury, you don't want me to start talking, because I won't be able to stop. You don't want to hear this."

"I do," she assured him. "I really do."

Sam's eye narrowed. "That's what people say when they don't know what they're getting in to. But fine. You wanna know?" He took a deep breath and rolled up his sleeves. "You see these scars?" He traced over them slowly. "This is Hebrew for 'whore'. This one's Arabic for 'slut'. This one says 'property of Michael'. This one says 'you deserve this'. This one means 'abomination'." He looked up to see her staring at his bare arms in horror. "This doesn't even scratch the surface of what they did to me. I told you, Ms. Pillsbury. You don't want to know."

She met his eyes, looking like she was about to cry. "You're right, I don't. Tell me anyway."

Sam blinked at her. "But you just said -"

"My purpose here is to help students. You're a student. Talking will help. So talk."

Guilt settled over him. "You really don't need to do this."

"I want to help you, Sam. Let me."

Sam took a deep breath and started talking. "The first thing you have to know is that they drugged me, so my perception was so screwed I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't...."

***  
Exhausted from the lack of sleep, the fight, and the time he'd spent talking to Pillsbury, Sam shuffled into glee club.

"Winchester! What happened to your face?" Puck called

"You should see the other guys," he joked weakly, voice hoarse. "Pretty sure three of 'em are still out cold."

Puck blinked. "What happened?"

"You know that rumor going around that I'm gay? Couple of idiots decided to gang up on me in the bathroom."

"How many is a couple?" Finn asked.

"Five."

"They were Karofsky's friends," Schuester told them. "I still don’t understand how you managed that. They were twice your size."

"Which can be used against them," Sam said. "If they hadn't gotten blood in my good eye, I would've won that fight."

"I think you won it anyway," Schuester said.

"Dude, look at me." Sam gestured at his face. "The last time I came out this badly in a fight was when I got shot for my wallet two years ago." It was actually seventeen years, not counting Cage time, but he'd been twelve, so it worked. Dad had patched him up in the motel bathroom. Dean never knew; he'd been out on a date at the time and neither of them had ever told.

"You've been shot?" Rachel squealed. "Did it hurt?"

"No," Sam deadpanned, "it was like running through a field of golden wheat while puppies frolicked beside me."

The room dissolved into laughter, and Sam smiled quietly. People really shouldn’t ask stupid questions.

"Okay then! Who's up first? Rachel, Finn?"

"Yeah!" Rachel said excitedly, apparently untroubled by Sam's sarcasm. She grabbed Finn's arm and pulled him forward. "We're doing _Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again_ , from Phantom of the Opera."

Sam racked his memory, trying to figure out if he'd ever seen it, as the band started to play.

He frowned and leaned over to Artie. "How do they know these songs?"

"Rachel and Finn went by to practice over the weekend."

"So they just learn every song we sing?"

"Yeah."

"That sounds...really demanding." Schuester had said it was a pair assignment, which implied there were usually solo assignments, and if there was something new every week, that meant the band had to learn five or six songs in that time frame.

"It is," Artie whispered back, "but they love it."

"If you say so." He sat back up and tried to pay attention.

Mike and Tina went after Finn and Rachel, with Rascal Flatts' _Why_ , followed by Brittany and Santana with _Slipped Away,_ and the day ended with Quinn and Mercedes belting out _Wreck on the Highway._ The whole time, Schuester watched Sam. He tried not to let it bother him, but the unwavering gaze started to get to him.

Schuester broke them up a little early. Someone grabbed Sam's arm, and he spun around, automatically falling into a defensive stance before he saw it was just Puck, who held up his hands and smirked. "Jumpy, Winchester?"

Sam scowled at him. "A little. What's up?"

"When are you free to practice the song? I still haven't heard you sing."

"Um." Sam mentally checked his schedule. "I have tomorrow after school off work."

"Artie, you good for tomorrow?"

"Sure."

"See you then. Yo, Santana!" Puck hurried off.

"He always like that?" Sam asked Artie.

Artie shook his head. "Usually he's a bit meaner. Guess he doesn't feel the need to go all alpha-male just now."

"Huh. Well, I gotta get to work. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Sounds good."

Mr. Schuester grabbed his arm when he started to leave. "Wait a minute, Sam, I want to talk to you."

Sam groaned internally. He was bruised, hurting, and tired; a heart-to-heart was the last thing he wanted, especially since he'd spent the past few hours in one. Still, he knew he shouldn't make waves. "What's up?"

"I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

Sam blinked at him. "Um, yeah. I'm fine. Can't see out of one eye, but hey, what can you do?"

"I meant emotionally."

"Oh." Sam's stomach sank. "I'm okay."

"Just okay?"

Sam looked away. "Mr. Schuester, I appreciate your concern. But my brother died less than a week ago and I'm doing the best I can."

Schuester let go of him. "If you need to talk, my door's always open."

Sam tried to smile, but knew it came out more of a grimace. "Thanks. I have to go or I'll be late for work." He escaped before the man could try to drag him into another subject.

Kurt was waiting for him by the Impala. "Hey, Sam."

"Hey." He unlocked the driver's door, slid in, and reached over to open the passenger door.

"So do you have a song yet?" Kurt asked as he slid in.

"Yeah, but I can't remember the name of it. It's by the band that did _Bad Company_." The engine coughed and turned over with a comforting roar.

"Puck chose, is that it?" Kurt asked with a small, wry smile.

"How'd you guess?"

"You don't seem the type." Kurt's smile briefly became a grin. "You might want to figure out what it is, though. We can play it at the garage so you can learn the words."

"I was planning on just swaying in the background."

"Nope. Sorry, Sam, you gotta sing."

He groaned. "No offense, Kurt, but show choir is emasculating me."

"None taken. A big, strong man like you can remasculate himself by killing things."

Sam blinked. "Is 'remasculate' even a word?"

"Probably not. It is now!"

Sam laughed and stopped for the light. "You're weird, you know that?" he asked, grinning.

"What?" Kurt actually looked a little hurt.

"No, no, Kurt, not like that," Sam said hastily. "Weird in a good way. Like, happy and funny and kind of off the wall. But good."

"Oh. Okay."

"So." Sam desperately cast around for a subject change. "What are you doing for the song?"

"Hear You Me, by Jimmy Eat World."

"That was Artie's first choice."

"Ever heard it?"

"A while ago." Sam beat absently on the steering wheel. "I was driving for once. I think we were going from Michigan to South Carolina and we had to get there fast. I want to say we were going after a ghost or a poltergeist, but that doesn't sound right. Either way, we needed to haul ass, so we didn't stop to sleep. We’d just changed positions, and I started fiddling around with the radio. As fantastic as Metallica is, the same tape on repeat for seven hours gets old. So I'm fiddling with the radio, Dean's trying to sleep, and the song comes on. We both started cracking up on the chorus, because angels are real dicks."

"Angels are real?" Kurt squeaked.

Sam nodded. "Every legend is real, Kurt. We've faced off with everyone from demons to Loki. Pretty sure Dean and I have killed or beaten…" He stopped to think. "I'm pretty sure the current tallies are one angel, two archangels, three gods, three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the Whore of Babylon."

"What."

"Yeah." Sam laughed, low and throaty. "The past few years have been a bloodbath."

"Sounds like." Kurt waited a beat. "So angels are real? What about God?"

Sam parked in front of the garage. "The Judeo-Christian God hasn't been heard from in a couple thousand years. Even when he was still calling the shots, there were only a handful of angels who ever talked directly to him. Most of those are dead or trapped now." He opened his car door. "C'mon. We can talk more when we're working."

Sam kept his word, answering Kurt's questions as they bent over separate cars. Sam censored out the worst of it, and from Burt's approving nod, he was doing a good job of it. He even told Kurt about the rabbit's foot curse, leaving out the fatalities it caused. "So we deal with the problem, and then the bitch shot me in the shoulder. And she stole the lottery tickets! Fifteen thousand, gone like that."

When Kurt laughed, Sam grabbed hold of it. As long as he could make someone happy, he could make it through this part of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Badass!Sammy returns! Even if he did get his ass handed to him. Five-on-one are odds nobody could beat.
> 
> Remember what I said about OOC behavior and flashbacks? Kicks in real deep in this chapter, telling Emma Pillsbury what happened to him. Mind-altering drugs seemed like a good way for him to talk about what actually happened without ending up on a locked ward. I'm actually a little scared by how much I enjoy writing torture scenes.
> 
> In case anyone was wondering, my version of glee club meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Sam's classes are 55 minutes long with six periods in a day. If you want me to post his actual schedule, let me know and I will.
> 
> [Updated 4-9; I decided it would flow better to add the last 1500 words or so here rather than at the beginning of the next chapter.]
> 
> Please review!


	5. Physical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam sings and digs a grave

Ch. 5 - Physical

"So." Puck smirked at him. "Can't dance, huh?"

Sam rolled his eyes. "The last time I danced was five years ago, and it was waltzing with an old lady I never saw again at somebody's wedding." It was actually at that damn gala and she wouldn't stop feeling him up, but they didn't have to know that.

"You don't move like it."

"Don't know what to tell you, dude."

"He's right, though," Artie said. "What did Kurt say, about you knowing how to fight? Maybe that helps."

"Yeah, probably," Sam said. "There's nothing like a knife fight to teach you to know where all your limbs are."

"Knife fight?" Puck asked. "Get into many of those?"

"Enough. My dad started me on single when I was six and double at seven."

"Single what now?"

"Single, you know, like one knife in one hand. Double is with a knife in each," Sam explained.

The looks on their faces told him everything he needed to know about how they were taking it.

"Okay, then. How about I order a pizza for dinner?" Artie suggested.

Sam blinked and looked at the clock. It was already coming up on seven. "Didn't realize it was so late."

"Do your parents need you home?" Artie asked.

"Just me, Artie, remember? I don't have a curfew."

"Right. Sorry," Artie mumbled. "So...pizza?"

"Sounds good to me." Puck stretched out. "You stayin', Sam?"

He shrugged. "Might as well."

Artie ordered a large pepperoni. While they were waiting for the delivery guy to get to his house, Puck said casually, "So...started on knives early?"

"Yep."

"Any good?"

"Yep."

"Do you know any actual fighting?"

"Yep."

"Like, hand-to-hand?"

"Yep."

"Started early on that, too?"

"Yep. What are you gearing up to ask, Puck?"

"Just - um - I kinda wanna see how good you are."

"You want to spar," Sam said. "We can do that."

"What?"

"We can spar," Sam repeated. "Maybe not now, but when I can see out of both eyes. Next week, sometime."

"Awesome," Puck said, and Sam could tell he meant it.

Sam hung in the background after that, listening to Puck and Artie making small talk. He gathered Puck used to be a bully, and Artie was one of his favorite victims, but that Puck was changing. He learned Puck had a younger sister, Sarah, whom he took care of while his mom worked. Artie was an only child with a mom that worked constantly and a dad that worked part-time. They'd both grown up in Lima. Puck thought of himself as a punk. Artie thought of himself as a geek. They were both juniors. Artie was in advanced classes, Puck stayed in regular. They were both, obviously, in Glee.

"So what about you?" Artie asked after the pizza was gone.

"Yeah, Sam," Puck added, shit-eating grin firmly in place. "You show up out of nowhere, say you're alone, and have a bunch of bad-ass scars. What's your story?"

"Uh. Mom died when I was a baby, we started moving a lot, Dad taught us how to protect ourselves until he died a couple years ago. Then Dean and me kept going until he died two weeks ago. I called up a friend, who told me Burt Hummel might have work for me, and here I am."

"If you don't mind me asking, how'd they die?" Artie asked.

"Mom died when our house was set on fire. Dad got shot. Dean got beaten to death along with a friend of ours. I almost went with him, but I woke up in the hospital instead."

"Holy shit," Puck said. "Think you're bad luck, dude."

Sam managed a smile. "Yeah. Pretty much."

"So where'd the scars come from?"

Sam weighed his options quickly. "Just around. Falling out of trees, that sort of thing."

"Oh, man, I hoped you were a child spy or something like that," Artie jokingly complained. "Fighting to save the world every week!"

Sam smiled weakly. "Sorry. I'm pretty boring."  
***  
"Sam, have you considered getting a teddy bear?"

Out of all the ways he'd imagined Miss Pillsbury starting their meeting, this one hadn't even crossed his mind.

"No," he said slowly, trying to figure out where she was going with this. "Is there a reason I should have?" Maybe regular teenage boys slept with stuffed animals all the time? Sam thought furiously back to his first adolescence - he couldn't remember any evidence for it.

"It's just that stuffed animals have been shown to have a calming effect on the mind," Pillsbury explained. "It might help you sleep better if you have something to hold."

That...made no sense at all. "How so?"

"It's what's referred to as a comfort object. And before you say it's too girly or childish" - her lips quirked in a smile - "there's been a study done that showed thirty-five percent of British adults sleep with a teddy bear."

Oh. Comfort objects. Sam kept a sawed-off under his bed he kept a hand on when he was feeling insecure, but somehow, he doubted Pillsbury would want to know that. He knew the basic psychology behind the idea - a soft object represents the mother, an attachment to which helps small children get through stressful times when their mother is gone. As a child, Sam had just had Dean, and Dean was never far. He suddenly, uncomfortably wondered if that was part of the reason Dean had always been so important to him.

He shook off the distraction and refocused on Pillsbury. "So you want me to get a teddy bear?"

"It might help you sleep better," she told him earnestly.

"I'll think about it," he told her.

"Good." She bit her lip. "I've been calling around since our last meeting, looking for resources. You need more help than I can give you. Trauma like you've suffered needs a clinical psychologist, at the very least. I have a list here, of counselors that work on a sliding scale." She handed him a piece of paper. "Sam, please, _please_ get yourself someone to talk to. I'm not qualified."

"I'll think about it."

"No, Sam." She leaned forward, suddenly intense, and he got the feeling very few people ever saw her like this, all tense fear and restrained anger and terrified urgency. "You can't just think about it. You have to talk about what happened to you before it destroys you. Before it changes you into someone you don't recognize. People who go through trauma like you did, it doesn't end well unless they get help. I can make seeing a counselor regularly a condition of your continued enrollment at this school if I need to."

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Do you feel like you need to?"

"I don't know," she said, looking him straight in the eyes. "Do I?"

"Fine. I'll give 'em a call, see what they can do. But I'm not going into a group home," he warned her. "They try to take away my emancipation, I'm gone somewhere you will _never_ find me."

"That's fair," Pillsbury said. "There's something else I want to talk to you about. Your test results came back."

Sam blinked. "I thought they came back before I scheduled classes?"

"No - no, those classes were just provisional until we got the results back."

"So what do they say?" Sam couldn't deny his curiosity.

"You could graduate at the end of this year if you wanted," Pillsbury told him. "It would mean rearranging your schedule, though. Is that what you want?"

"Yes." Sam didn't even have to think twice. "How much rearrangement needs to be done?"  
***  
"That was awesome, Sam!" Kurt said enthusiastically when he got into the Impala.

"Thanks," Sam said awkwardly. "It was more Puck and Artie, though."

"Maybe," Kurt allowed, "but you were really good, too."

Sam just nodded. He didn't know what else to do.

The shift at the garage passed the way it always did, with him, Kurt, and Mr. Hummel trading stories. Sam was as fascinated by their tales of suburbia as they were by his stories of combat.

"So - wait - you guys _actually_ have block parties?" he said incredulously at one point.

"Yeah! What, you've never been to one?"

"Kurt, might I remind you that this is the longest I've stayed in one place in seven years?" Sam said dryly. "And before that I lived in a string of motels and abandoned houses and the back of the car?"

"Oh," Kurt said quietly. "Right. Sorry."

"It's okay," Sam said. "Just - the things you think are entirely normal are things I've never thought about. I still remember the day I found out not everyone put salt around their windows and doors."

"How old were you?" Mr. Hummel asked.

Sam checked the dipstick of the car he'd just opened up. "Seven. We were in - oh, geez - Minnesota, maybe? Somewhere north, anyway, because it was freezing in September. I said something about it to a boy in my class, 'It's my job to check the salt lines', and when my teacher asked me about it I told her. I didn't see why I shouldn't. And that was the first time we got CPS on our asses."

"The first time?" Mr. Hummel repeated. "How many times did you get called on?"

"I have no idea," Sam said. "It's a dangerous job. Kids come in with bruises and broken bones and claw marks, people notice. I lost count when I was eleven."

"When you were - when did you _start?_ " Mr. Hummel asked, sounding vaguely worried.

"I did my first salt-'n'-burn when I was nine," Sam admitted. "First actual hunt when I was ten."

"And your father was okay with that?"

Sam laughed until he cried.  
***  
On Saturday, Sam caught word of a possible haunting in Dayton. He headed over after he got off work to check it out. It didn't take long to figure out it was a little old lady named Rose Bennes who had been killed seven years earlier by her daughter for the insurance money. He waited until twilight to drive to the cemetery and start digging.

He'd forgotten how hard it was to dig a grave by himself, especially as a teenager. The dirt had been packed hard, and Sam had to put every ounce of strength he had into each push downward. At the same time, he had to keep an eye out for Bennes, who could materialize at any time.

She showed up a little after eleven, almost four hours after he'd started digging, and Sam shot her before she sent him flying. He went back to digging with renewed urgency.

She showed up twice more before he made it to her actual coffin, and then again as he was climbing out of the grave. He swore and grabbed the shotgun, but he'd only loaded three shells. She picked him up and threw him away from her remains.

His head hit a marker - thankfully, the cemetery didn't allow tombstones - and stars flashed before his eyes. He scrambled up; when she materialized in front of him and put a hand through his chest, he didn't bother swatting at her. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket and grabbed a spare salt shell, which he cracked open and threw into her face. She disappeared with a wail, and Sam scrambled back to the grave before she came back.

The bag of rock salt he'd lugged in was opened, its contents poured. Lighter fluid followed, and then matches - five of them all at once, to make sure the flame wouldn't be extinguished by the fall. Old Rose Bennes went up like dry tinder.

Now Sam just had to wait for the fire to die down before he filled the grave back in.

In the meantime, he carried the salt and lighter fluid back to the car, where he checked his head in the side mirror. He had a bump, but no cut, and he wasn't dizzy enough to be concussed. He was sore, though; his fourteen-year-old body wasn't used to the hard labor needed for gravedigging.

Satisfied he wasn't seriously injured, he headed back to the open grave, where he settled down next to the flaming remains and laid down, dozing off and on, as he waited for them to finish burning.

He woke for the final time around one, when he checked the grave and saw only embers. He stood with a groan, overworked muscles protesting the movement, and started shoveling the gravedirt back into the hole.


	6. Misery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Straight angst, no real plot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Themes in this chapter/timestamp thing: depression, death, suicidal thoughts/ambivalence

The last thing Sam wanted was to get out of bed, but it was Monday. He had school and work and glee club.

Fuck he hated school and work and glee club.

Long, lazy blink. He didn't have the energy for anything faster, despite going to bed early the night before.

His cell phone alarm went off again and he rolled over, slapping ineffectually at it with a hand he didn't want to move. He eventually managed to curl his fingers enough to hit the 'end' button, and the alarm cut off.

Empty apartment. Silence. Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose, snuggling back down into his pillows and comforter. Quiet. Still. Peaceful at this early hour.

_Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt._

Sam lifted his head. Who the hell would be texting him?

_Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt._

He fumbled for his phone, if only to make it shut up.

_U wernt in chem. u ok?_

Artie it was. Sam glared at his phone like it had betrayed him and was vaguely, distantly surprised to find it was already past ten. He debated answering the text and, deciding it wasn't worth the effort, went back to staring at the wall.

Eleven came and went, then noon. Sam kept staring at the wall, thoughts circling around and around in his head, too listless to bother moving. The next time his phone buzzed, he ignored it.

That was the good thing about being an adult, he reflected. You could ignore everything and the world didn't feel like it was ending.

That the world felt like it was ending for other reasons was something never discussed.

Sam rubbed his face and tried to give himself a pep talk. _Come on, Sam. You've faced down vampires and wendigoes and shapeshifters. You survived Lucifer for a few hundred years. What's getting out of bed and going to school?_

But it wasn't just school. If he went today, he'd have to go tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until school was an everyday thing and he had responsibilities and people were expecting him to do things and he just. Couldn't. Too many people wanting too many things -

He cut off his own train of thought. Different pep talk, then. _Sam. You can do this. You know you can. Come on, Sam, one thing at a time._

This was part of being a teenager he hadn't missed. Periodically, he would get to the point where nothing mattered, and nothing ever fucking _had_ mattered, and he couldn't even summon the energy to get out of bed because what was the point anyway? They were all going to die bloody. There were too few hunters for the evil in the world. He couldn't do anything but drag Dean and his father down, away from the hunt, with his stupid selfish desires and dreams of a life where he made it to thirty without dying.

 _Didn't even make it to twenty-five,_ he thought bitterly.

Dean had been great when Sam got like this. Dean had talked to him quietly, and stroked his forehead (lifting the unspoken no-touching rule), and wiped his tears away with gentle hands. Dean had told him that they all had each others' backs and sat with him. At night, Dean laid down behind him and quietly wrapped him in a hug, reminding him tactilely that he wasn't alone in this. He'd quietly pulled the razors from the bathroom and the knives from the bedroom, and Sam knew it was because Dean was secretly terrified of what he would do with them.

If Sam hadn't seen Dean's fear, he might have succumbed to the overwhelming need that gripped him at times. Still, he was grateful to Dean for removing the temptation, even if they never talked about it and he was sure the precaution wasn't necessary with the way Dean looked.

Their father, on the other hand, had either yelled at him (which made him worse, _stupid fuck-up waste of space and energy_ ) or found a hunt far enough away he wouldn't get back before the cycle ended and Sam was on solid ground once more.

He'd evened out some at Stanford, when he had some space to breathe. When he learned to recognize the parts of himself he loathed the most (the shyness, the anxiety) and how to change. When he learned how to help himself out of the spiral of shame and self-loathing that came over him. Looking back, Sam couldn't even remember what he was supposed to hate himself for. Whatever it was, it didn't compare to the shit he'd done more recently - but then, he'd done time in the Cage as penance.

But now, there was no Dean. He turned his face and buried it in the pillow. There was no Dean to hold him, no Dean to speak quietly and kindly, no Dean to take away things he could use to hurt himself.

The freedom was as breathtaking as the loneliness.

 _If it ever gets bad,_ he reminded himself, _I know how to end it._

Now that he knew about Hell, though, it wasn't as comforting as it had been when he was a teen. He was headed down anyway, but why get there ahead of schedule? He'd just be even more miserable.

He didn't exactly want to die. He knew some truly fantastic people, he had a decent life, he was helping people. He didn't want to die, he just wanted out of this life. He wanted his brother, as childish as it was, and that was something denied him.

His phone buzzed again, and he almost threw it at the wall.

_Get out of bed, Sam, what's wrong with you?_

One of the things he'd learned about himself at Stanford and from Dean was that he did much better with gentle prodding than barked orders. He'd forgotten, somehow, maybe because he hadn't been someone's underling for so long. He'd been Dean's partner, not subordinate. But he remembered now, and he used that knowledge against himself.

Moving slowly and deliberately, Sam talked himself into sitting up and checking his messages.

Kurt: _U sick? Or hurt?_

_1 new voicemail_

He answered Kurt first. _Took a day off. I'll be in for work._

Then came the voicemail, an automated message. "Hello. This message is to inform you that your child - _Samuel. Winchester._ \- was not at school today. Please send a note with your child tomorrow."

Sam scowled at the phone. _Yeah. Child._

He shifted his attention. _Sam, you need to sit up and get ready for work. You like work, remember? Come on, Sam, you can do it._

And fuck if needing to speak to himself like he was a frightened child didn't make him miserable.

_You can wallow on Sunday, Sam, but right now you need to do this._

He pushed his head into his pillow and groaned. _How can one person be such a colossal fuck-up in so many ways?_

He considered the benefits of smothering himself but, again, Hell. When he couldn't even consider death as a way out of life, he knew he was fucked.

He made it in to work. When he got off, he found the Goodwill and shelled out five bucks for a stuffed moose in a red sweater with a white 'B'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know. It's been forever since I updated. I'm sorry. 
> 
> "Misery" was originally supposed to be a timestamp, a self-indulgent piece I wrote when I was feeling like crap and would post later. The thing is, I felt so bad about leaving y'all hanging for so long and posting such a short chapter last time (it's only 2,000 words! D: I don't like posting chapters less than 3,500), I decided to post this as well to try to make up for it.
> 
> Now that Sam's all settled in, we're going to start skipping time. When important things happen in Glee canon, that's going to show up. Character interactions are going to start happening more often. Speaking of which, Sam'Kurt is my brotp, in case you missed it.
> 
> Please leave a review! They make me happy. :)


	7. Poker Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fight, a bar, and a duet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh...sorry about the gigantic gap between updates. *embarrassed cough* Over the interim, I dropped out of my four-year for health reasons, moved back into my parents' house, started community college (and got a 4.0 last semester), applied to a different four-year, applied and was rejected for a few dozen jobs, lost interest in this story and then regained it several times, wrote a lot of the sequels (almost none of which have an ending yet), planned out the next several decades of this story, started and wrote 100k for a different, smuttier story, gone to the doctors several times, changed pain medications about seven times (some of them made me a zombie, some of them got me high as a kite, some of them did exactly nothing, and none of them worked; in fact, some of them made it worse. All of them had me writing crackfic that will never ever see the light of day), et cetera. It's been a busy nine months.
> 
> That said: there's going to be one more (short) chapter in the current time, then a jump to the end of the school year. The first sequel will take place roughly five years after this story ends. If I get inspired, I may come back and fill in more of his time in Lima, but for the most part, I'm going to try to get this wrapped up in a way that a) doesn't kill me and b) makes sense.
> 
> Please review. I get happy when I see that 'Inbox (1)' on the side of my page.

"A bake sale?" Sam blurted, dismayed. "Seriously?"

"How else are we going to raise money?" Rachel asked.

Sam resisted the temptation to rub his eyes. _Teenagers,_ he thought grumpily.

Yeah, mood swings were something he was definitely glad to have grown out of.

"Bake sales won't raise nearly enough," Sam said, already making plans. "How much do we need?"  
***  
"Your break," Sam said, stepping back from the pool table. 

The man he was playing smirked and shot. Sam had lost two hundred to him already; he had eight hundred riding on this match. He'd had to drive an hour and a half away from Lima before he found a likely place, but he didn't care.

Sam had thrown the first two games, cutting it close enough the man would think him a challenge but not close enough for him to start thinking Sam was hustling him. It was a balancing act, and one Sam was good at.

"I feel bad taking your money like this," the man drawled when he had three balls left on the table and Sam had six.

Sam's anger surged and he carefully cut it back. He was looking at a net gain of six hundred, almost half of what they needed for the bus, but he had to avoid a fight or he'd lose everything. He sank four balls but fumbled the fifth, making sure he ended the cue ball in a position where the other man would need to be a wizard to sink any of his.

Sure enough, the man missed. Sam almost grinned at where the cue ended up, perfectly positioned for his shot. His last two balls sank easily and he lined up for the eight. "Corner right," he said.

It sank.

"You cheated," the man snapped.

"How could I have cheated?" Sam asked sarcastically. "Did I switch the balls out somehow?"

"You cheated," he insisted.

"No, I didn't. You lost."

"I didn't lose!"

Sam subtly shifted his grip on the cue, ready to use it as a weapon if he needed to. "Let it go, man. Pay up."

"Double or nothing," the man insisted.

Sam shook his head. "Not when you're acting like this."

"Let it go, Gary," someone else said, sidling up. "He won fair. Pay him."

"He's twelve!"

"Didn't matter when you were winning," Sam said coolly. "And I'm most certainly older than twelve."

"Gary," the second man said, "let it go."

"I will not -"

"I'm sorry about him," the second man said. "I'm Paul, by the way. Gary here's not used to losing."

Sam nodded. "I can understand that. He still owes me."

"I owe you nothing!"

"Go wait at the table," Paul said, rolling his eyes. He waited until Gary was gone before he pulled out his own wallet and counted out bills. "I'm sorry about him."

"You didn't make the bet," Sam said. "I'm not taking your money."

"We're together, man, what's mine is his and vice versa."

Sam nodded slowly and accepted the bills. "Didn't realize Ohio would recognize your marriage."

"They don't. We married in Vermont."

"How long you been together?" Sam asked.

"Four years next month." Paul smiled. "You got anyone special?"

Sam shook his head. "It's just me."

"Your parents still together?"

"They're dead," Sam said bluntly. "It's just me."

"That why you need the money?" Paul suddenly looked sympathetic.

"No!" Sam laughed a bit. "No, I got a decent gig in a garage, pays enough for rent and food and a little for an emergency stash. This is so a group at my school can rent the handicapped bus for a trip. One of the guys is in a wheelchair."

"And eight hundred will cover it?"

"Nah. Besides, this is really only six. He won two off me in the first two games." Sam smiled. "It'll cover almost half. They were trying to raise all sixteen hundred through bake sales."

"Bake sales?" Paul repeated.

"Yeah." Sam rolled his eyes. "Teenagers are idiots sometimes."

"You're a teenager," Paul reminded him.

"And I'm not immune to idiocy," Sam said dryly. "It was nice talking to you, Paul, but I gotta get back home so I can get to work."

"Nice talking to you, too," Paul said. He left to join his husband and Sam slipped outside.  
***  
"Mr. Schuester," Sam said, pulling the cash out his wallet. "Here. For the bus." 

"Where did you get this?" Schuester asked, looking like he wasn't sure whether he should be suspicious or grateful.

"Pool."

"I didn't realize there was a pool tournament anywhere this weekend."

"Hour and a half away." Sam shrugged. "Faster than bake sales."

"Thank you, Sam. This is...how much is this?"

"Six hundred. Not enough, but better than nothing."

"Wow. Thank you."

Sam had to smile. "You and I both know bake sales wouldn't have gotten us anywhere close. There's some card games I can hit up later this week."  
***  
Poker was always more lucrative than pool. Sam was smart with everything from the way he dressed - short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, no way to slip in his own cards - to the way he played - contributing the very minimum to the pot until he was sure he had a good hand, at which he point he started raising it slowly. Over the course of four games, he hauled in twelve hundred.

Naturally, he was accused of cheating. Some people, especially grown men, didn't like getting beaten by a teenager. He ended up on the wrong side of a blade, which bit deep from his forehead down to his chin along the side of his face. Sam pulled his own knife.

It was at that point the bystanders started to intervene. They were fine seeing a teenager and a grown man get into it, but the second weapons got involved, all bets were off. Nobody wanted to see a murder go down.

Sam grabbed his winnings and slipped out the side door while his opponent was busy getting the shit kicked out of him by people angry at him for slicing up a teenager. The amusing thing, Sam reflected as he started up the car, was that their anger blinded them to him slipping out the side.

Lucifer had told him once that given a choice between getting revenge on a person and helping someone that person had hurt, humans would go for revenge every time. Not for the first time, he wondered how Lucifer managed to be so right all the time.

He was still bleeding when he pulled up outside of his apartment building. It was barely seven o'clock, so the street was crowded with people and cars. He did his best to hide the blood dripping from his chin as he made his way up to the apartment and let himself in.

Something else Lucifer had said was that people were generally oblivious to the suffering of others, that someone could be shot in broad daylight and nobody would call the cops. Sam had just walked up four flights of stairs, passing nearly a dozen people, and not one of them had commented on the blood pouring down his face. When had Lucifer learned humanity so well?

The stitch job he gave himself was nothing special. Wipe the area clean, douse it with alcohol, pull the needle through and through and through, again and again, until the gash was held closed. Small, tight stitches made their way down the right side of his face.

He poured alcohol down the side of his head again and popped some Prednisone just to be safe before he went about his normal nightly routine.  
***  
"What happened to your face?" Kurt blurted the next day.

Sam shrugged. "Poker game. He wasn't too happy when I won twelve hundred off him."

"Twelve hundred?" Mercedes asked. "Damn, boy."

"That's not too big a pot. I've gone in for five thousand before. I held my own."

"That's holding your own?" Tina asked, appalled.

"He was aiming for my eye. Couple of onlookers intervened when the knives came out."

"Knives? Plural?" Kurt squeaked.

"Someone pulls a knife on me, I pull one of my own. Basic defense."

"Why were you even playing him?" Mercedes asked.

"Bake sales aren't going to even start to cover the cost of the bus," Sam pointed out. "This and the pool money will, plus some left over for my emergency stash."

"Emergency stash?" Kurt repeated.

"Cash is untraceable by the IRS," Sam said. "If I don't claim it, it doesn't exist. Makes sense to have cash on hand, anyway. Bet your parents keep some in the house, too." He smirked. "Besides, gambling is technically illegal anyway. I couldn't claim it no matter what."

"Yeah, but how much of your emergency stash went toward putting in those stitches?" Mercedes asked.

"None, actually. Did 'em myself. Didn't see the point in going to the ER when I can do a better job in the bathroom, and I have antibiotics on hand." Sam forced himself to take a bite of his sandwich. "Not the first time I've done it, probably won't be the last."

"You can't work in the garage like that," Kurt said, sounding worried. "What if grease gets in?"

"So I'll tape up some gauze." Sam shrugged. "Guys, really, it's not a big deal. I've been hurt worse." He had the scars to prove it now, too.

That wasn’t the first time that day he had to defend himself, passing it off to most people as a bad fall and an inconvenient table. Sylvester gave him a hard time about it; he shrugged her off and pulled out his math book.

Then it hit him - he was graduating this year. That meant there was no way in hell he could pass for an adult, which meant there was no way in hell he would be able to go back to hunting.

 _Shit._ Why couldn't he have stayed an adult?

He was still mulling that over when glee club came around. "All right, folks," Schuester started. "We're doing something different this week." He turned to write on the whiteboard, they was he always did. "Ballads! You're going to be paired up for this, and you'll be singing to your partner. I've put names in this hat."

Finn paired with Kurt, Puck with Mercedes, Artie with Tina. Sam didn't know many of the others.

 _No, no, no,_ Sam chanted silently when it was Rachel's turn to draw. She reminded him of Becky in the worst way.

"Sam," she said.

_Shit._

"Okay, pair up, start working," Schuester ordered.

Rachel made a beeline for him. "So, I was thinking, there are a lot of ballads I like, but we have to complement each other, so maybe you pick yours and then I'll pick mine because I know so many-"

"Rachel," Sam interrupted, "how about you just tell me what to learn and I'll learn it?"

Her face drops. "But - don't you want-"

"I'm doing this because I needed an art credit," he told her bluntly, "or an extracurricular, or whatever it's called here. I'm graduating at the end of this year. I don't _care._ Just give me marching orders. You like being in charge."

Rachel swallowed. "Okay. Okay. Um, we could Google, maybe? Find a ballad you like? It's not going to be good if you don’t like it. Maybe you can come over after school?"

"I have work," he said. "I get off at six - maybe we can meet at eight, so you can eat?"

"Why don't you come over when you get off and have dinner with us?" Rachel suggested.

"No, I-"

"Come on, Sam, please. My dads _love_ meeting my friends."

 _Because you don’t have many,_ Sam thought viciously, and instantly felt ashamed. "Okay. I'll be over around six-thirty. Where do you live?"

And so Sam found himself sitting in a living room with a girl he didn't like and her fathers while dinner finished cooking. He had to wonder which one was her biological dad, or if either was - maybe she'd been adopted? It really wasn't any of his business, so he forced himself away from that train of thought.

"So, Sam," LeRoy began. "What brought you to Lima?"

"The Hummels are friends of a friend," Sam answered. "Burt owns a garage, and I figured I could get work here."

"What do your parents do?" Hiram asked.

"They're dead. My whole family is." Sam scratched a scar through his sleeve.

"I'm sorry to hear that. So you're living on your own?"

"Yes, sir."

"Please, call me Hiram. You drive a very nice car - did the Hummels fix it up for you?"

"No. It was my dad's car, and then my brother's, and now it's mine. We've kept it in good shape." Sam smiled a bit sadly. "Dean - my brother - he loved that thing."

"So you like cars. What else do you like to do?"

This felt more like an interrogation for a boyfriend than for a friend, if that's what he and Rachel were, but Sam squashed that thought ruthlessly. "I don’t have a lot of hobbies," he admitted.

"Sam likes to fight," Rachel said quickly.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Make me sound like a hothead, who don't you," he said sarcastically. "I really don't enjoy it. It's just something I can do."

"Where did you learn?" LeRoy asked.

"Everywhere. I grew up on the road - we spent about a week in a town, usually, this is the longest I've stayed anywhere in _years_ \- and we didn't always sleep in the nicest places."

"He's teaching Kurt how to defend himself," Rachel added proudly.

"Someone has to," Sam pointed out reasonably. "What about you guys? What do you like to do?"

"I like to cook," LeRoy offered.

"Honey, we _all_ like to cook," Hiram joked.

"Tell Sam how you met," Rachel suggested.

"We were in a play together," Hiram explained. "Love at first sight."

Sam smiled, thinking of Jess.

"What about your parents? How did they meet?" LeRoy asked.

"I don't know. My mom died when I was a baby, and Dad never talked about her." Sam couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice. "What are your jobs?"

"I'm a stockbroker," Hiram said.

"Lawyer," LeRoy said.

"Oh, what type?" Sam asked.

"Civil suits, mostly."

"Sounds interesting," Sam said, remembering pre-law. "Bet you've heard a lot of dirty laundry."

"You'd be amazed," LeRoy said, and then he was off and running, telling Sam about infidelities and drug dealers and how 'irreconcilable differences' was often code for 'one of the parties is gay'.

Somewhere in the midst of the stories the oven beeped and they moved into the kitchen to eat and talk. Dinner was vegetable lasagna; the red sauce reminded Sam far too much of blood, and the fake meat was too close to _real_ meat for his liking, but he forced back the memories and ate a square, politely declining seconds. It wasn't long before he was following Rachel up to her room.

"Okay, so," Rachel said, booting up her computer. "Let's find some ballads for you."

The first page they found was on a community-driven message board. "See anything you like?" Rachel asked brightly.

Sam stared at the list in dismay. "I know none of these."

"Not even Iris?" she protested.

" _Should_ I know Iris?"

Rachel looked scandalized. "Well, we'll just have to find the songs online. I'm sure you won't mind singing _one_ of these to me."

"Maybe we should find the lyrics instead," Sam suggested diplomatically. "It'll be faster than listening all the way through all of them."

"Oh, all right."

Rachel opened up a new tab and the research began.

The lyrics to half of them almost made him start crying, based as they were around losing siblings or parents. The other half were almost universally love songs.

They ended up deciding on "Dancing" by Elisa. Rachel insisted it was perfect for him, but he wasn't sure he could pull off a song about staying alive for her and thought privately she just wanted to be told she was the center of attention. Rachel promised she was going to sing something special for him, but refused to tell him what it was; he really didn't care. Two hours after they finished dinner, Sam left for his lonely, echoing apartment and another night spent jerking awake from nightmares every hour or so.

They were told at lunch on Tuesday that the rest of the glee club had apparently decided to sing a Cyndi Lauper song to Finn and Quinn. Sam shrugged and accepted the sheet music Kurt handed him.

Of course, Schue had to shoot them down, telling them that they could do a group number if they wanted but it wouldn't take the place of their own duets. Sam spent the rest of the period listening to the same songs over and over until he wanted to punch the singers in the face, but at least he knew the words.

To no one's surprise, the group number came out well. The individual ballads were a bit more ranged, with Sam doing about as well as he'd expected, and Tina doing an absolutely fantastic job.

They'd all expected Rachel to do a good job, but still, the song she chose was surprising. Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper, something from Broadway - that's what they'd thought she'd choose, but no.

Switchfoot.

It wasn't until the chorus that she grabbed his hands and pulled him up. "I dare you to move."

He sat right back down and mouthed, "No."

Then she reached the last verse, about redemption and salvation, and Sam had to fight to keep his face from curling into a sneer. Whatever forgiveness Rachel could extend him meant absolutely nothing when she didn't even know what he'd done. What he continued to do. How he always, _always_ fucked everything up.

But, he supposed, the song was primarily about welcoming someone, so he managed a smile for her when she was done.


	8. Tell Me Something Good, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam's first therapy appointment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR warning for torture and gore. I split the chapter at the end of the discussion, so you can skip if you don't want to read/are squeamish and you won't miss anything important to the overall plot.

"So, Sam," the man across from him said pleasantly, "what brings you here today?"

Sam rubbed a hand on his knee. "A few years ago," he said, choosing his words carefully, "I was kidnapped. I've had a hard time moving on."

"And by 'hard time', you mean?"

Sam shifted uncomfortably and decided, _Fuck it, why not?_ "I can't sleep for longer than an hour or two at a time. I can eat maybe half a potato before I get sick. There are times I think I'm back there - I got in a fight at school, a few weeks ago, and I almost killed one of the guys who was attacking me." Sam realized he was shaking and wrapped his arms around himself to try to control it.

"What happened to your face?"

Sam touched the stitches self-consciously. "Got in a fight."

"Why?"

"The Glee club needed money for a bus, and I bet with a sore loser."

The man scribbled something down on the notepad. "Do you often get money through betting?"

"Not so much anymore. Growing up, yeah, I would hustle with my dad and brother, but I work in a garage now, and that's enough for food and rent."

"What if you want something outside food and rent?"

"I save up for it. I really only went for the bets because they needed money fast and were trying to get all of it through _bake sales._ "

The man half-smiled, which Sam counted as a win; the man had kept his face in a perfect expression of polite interest after he'd introduced himself. Sam couldn't remember his name.

"When you were kidnapped, what happened?"

Sam swallowed. "While they had me, or how they got me, or…?"

"When they had you."

"Um." Sam laughed nervously. "They, uh, tortured me."

"You've said that. How?" he pushed.

"Might be easier to show you," Sam said quietly, rolling up his sleeves, grateful now that the de-aging had left him with physical scars that should have remained on his soul.

The man leaned forward, and Sam was gratified to see him pale. It may have been a little needy, but he wanted someone to tell him he'd gone through a lot, even nonverbally, even if they couldn't know how much he'd deserved it.

"Well. Um. That's certainly...something. But I'd really like to hear, in your own words, what happened."

Sam blinked and tried to remember what he'd told Pillsbury. "They drugged me, a lot of the time. I couldn't know what was real, there were times I didn't even know which way was up. But there were knives, and fire, and ice, and they -" His voice broke and, to his horror, he felt tears welling up. He hadn't cried in _years_ except for when Dean or Bobby had died. Even when he'd been institutionalized he'd kept it together better than this.

Fucking teenage hormones.

"Sam, did they touch you?"

Sam nodded, unable to meet his eyes.

"So fire, ice, knives, and sexual assault? Was there anything else?"

Sam remember the taste of himself and the taste of Adam's body ( _Adam wasn't there Adam was free Michael had gotten rid of him before he set foot in Stull_ ) and nodded, shuddering. "They'd - I wasn't the only one they had, and when someone died, I mean - free meat."

The man swallowed, looking queasy. "So they fed you human flesh?"

"They made me prepare it." Sam shuddered, remembering their hands reaching inside his skull and pressing on spots, reaching beneath his skin and twitching the muscles, reaching into his spinal cord and setting it on fire, making his hands and arms move against his will. He remembered the resistance of skin and flesh and bone, remembered the sound of joints popping and cracking. Remembered the feel of his own hands cutting deep into his flesh, removing his tongue his stomach his spleen his legs his toes and then putting them over a fire one of them made and picking everything they wanted him to season it with and he screamed and screamed and screamed but no sound came out because he _couldn't control his body_.

"Sam? Sam!" The man was leaning forward in his chair, and Sam realized he was breathing hard.

"Sorry. Sorry," he said leaning back and forcing himself to take deep breaths, seven in, eleven out, Jess had taught him when he'd wake up from nightmares, she'd learned the pattern in one of her psych classes, anti-anxiety, good for calming down and warding off panic attacks, and the thought of Jess no longer made him feel like ripping himself apart was that good or bad did he even know the difference anymore-

_"Sam!"_

"Sorry," he said, dragging himself back into the present. Therapist's office, he reminded himself. Dim light. Comfortable chairs. Dark walls. A man looking at him with worry written on his face, and Sam _knew_ he was fucked up but _damn._ A therapist who specialized in PSTD was worried about him - that couldn't be good news.

"Okay," the man said. "You don't have to talk about what actually happened quite yet. That's okay. Let's talk about what happened after you got out."

"My brother Dean and I traveled a while. I didn't - I didn't handle the memories well. Dean took care of me. Our dad died when I was ten, so he wasn't there. Dean died a few weeks ago and another friend of ours, Garth, got me set up with the Hummels here in town."

"How did Dean die?"

"There was a fight." Sam shifted uncomfortably. "Some...people, with a grudge against us, took someone we cared about. We went in to save him, me and Dean and Cas. Dean and Cas didn't make it out. I haven't seen the guy we went in for since, he...took off." Not what happened, but he couldn't exactly explain that he didn't know what happened except Kevin being dead was the best of all possible outcomes for him.

He couldn't even tell the man how old he was. How was this supposed to help?

"And you got out unscathed?"

"Not entirely." Sam rubbed his knee again. "But I survived."

"And since then you've had trouble sleeping? What about everyday life?"

"I can drive okay, and school's...well, it's high school. A thousand shallow, self-absorbed hormone tanks shoved into one building. Three of them attacked me in the bathroom and I got blood in my eyes, and I had a flashback, I think it was, I thought I was back there again, and the school counselor threatened to expel me if I didn't go to a therapist. So here I am."

"Okay. I'm sorry, but there are a few questions I have to ask, okay?" He didn't wait for Sam to answer. "Have you ever hurt yourself on purpose?"

"No." Not for any reason but to keep reality straight, but he sure as shit knew better than to say that.

"Have you ever considered suicide or made a plan?"

"No." Dying to save the world wasn't _technically_ suicide, right? It was martyrdom, or in his case, cleaning up the mess he'd made.

"Have you ever starved yourself, made yourself purge, or otherwise had an unhealthy relationship with food?"

"No." He just ate healthy, and sometimes it wouldn't stay down, and if he pushed himself too far on a run, that was nobody's business but his own.

"Where do see yourself in ten years?"

 _Dead._ "Um, I don't know. I don't really have things figured out that far."

"That's all right. What are your goals for therapy?"

Sam struggled briefly to come up with an answer. "To...not...lose track of things, I guess?"

The man made another note. "We're about out of time. Is there anything else you want me to know?"

"No."

Sam might have said it a little too fast, because the man looked at him with narrowed eyes for a moment, but he ultimately let it go. "Do you want to set up another appointment?"

"Yeah, probably."

"All right, then. Is the same time next week okay?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess." Burt would give him an hour on Tuesdays if he told him why he needed it.

"Great." The man grabbed a business card from the desk and scribbled it down. "If you need to cancel, just give us a call twenty-four hours in advance."

"Thanks," Sam said awkwardly, standing with him and shaking his hand.

"Take care, Sam."

"You too."


	9. Tell Me Something Good, Pt. 2

And so it went for weeks. He went to school, work, and therapy; he dodged Karofsky and his goons; and he hunted. He went to Regionals, which they won. Quinn had her baby. He continued to teach Kurt the basics of self-defense.

Life went on even though he wished it would stop.

Burt pulled him aside one day. "I want you to tell me something," he said.

"What?"

"I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me you're not training Kurt to become a hunter."

Sam snorted in laughter. "Even if I tried, kid wouldn't do it. Both feet in or both feet out, anything else gets you dead unless you've got enough experience you can kill things blind drunk. 'Sides, I wouldn't drag someone into this life if there was any way to avoid it. _I_ don't want in this life."

"So why are you still in?" Burt growled.

"Because if they think I'm losing my touch, I'm dead. Everyone close to me is dead." Sam met Burt's eyes squarely. "I'm doing the best I can to keep the monsters away from you and your son. That means killing them."

Burt sighed. "I can see that. You're a good kid, Sam." He ruffled Sam's hair; Sam tried not to grimace. It had been a long time since anyone had done that. "You have plans for Christmas?" Sam shook his head. He didn't celebrate Christmas anymore, not after meeting the angels. "Why don't you come over for dinner? Carol would love a chance to feed someone else up."

"That sounds wonderful," Sam said, and meant it.

"Great! Christmas day, around two in the afternoon?"

"I'll be there."

In the middle of November, his phone buzzed against his thigh during study hall. He quietly grabbed the bathroom pass and ducked into an empty stall to check his voicemail. Four people had this number, and he'd written them all off as dead.

" _Sam! It's Kevin. Look, I don't know how much time I have. I got away from Crowley's goons. Call me._ "

Fuck. He hadn't thought about Kevin since that meeting with the therapist, and guilt crashed over him. He was building a life while Kevin was being tortured by Crowley - but how could he have known that?

He called back quickly. "Sam?" Kevin said as soon as he picked up.

"Yeah, hi, Kevin. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Are you okay?"

Sam laughed, but it was strained. "We'll talk about that later. Where are you?"

"Indiana."

"Okay. Okay. Is there any way you can get to Ohio?"

"Where in Ohio?"

"It's a little town called Lima."

"Like the bean?"

"Yeah, Kev, like the bean." Sam leaned his head against the wall. "Can you get here?"

"Um, yeah. Yeah. I can - I can take a bus, or hitchhike, or-"

"Don't hitchhike," Sam ordered. "You don't know who'll pick you up. Listen, Kevin, I gotta go. I'll call you in a couple hours, okay?"

"Okay. Bye."

"Bye."

Sam slipped the phone back in his pocket. The Indiana border was, what, two hours away? Kevin might make it to Lima before Sam was even out of school, and then just showing up to get him would be pointless. Or maybe there wouldn't be a bus and Sam would drive out after work to pick him up. Either way, Sam was determined to get Kevin somewhere safe _today_ after he'd dropped the ball so many months before.

He flushed the toilet to make it believable and went back to study hall, wondering absently what had happened to the Leviathan tablet.  
***  
He called Kevin in the time between American History and glee club, sitting on the grass outside the high school and hoping like hell Kevin would be calm about it.

Because people coming off the tail end of months of torture were always so _calm._

Kevin picked up on the third ring. "Sam?"

"Kevin, hey, yeah, sorry about earlier."

"It's okay. You working a case?"

"Not...exactly." Sam blew out a breath. "I'm not...how I was."

"Yeah, I know."

"What?"

"Dude, one second you were covering me and the next you were a fucking kid again."

Sam breathed out a shaky laugh. "So you're cool with me being fourteen?"

Kevin sighed. "Maybe? Look, I've had months with Crowley. Even if you are fourteen, you're still my best damned chance at staying alive." Sam couldn't argue with that, but before he could say anything, Kevin barreled on, "Do you know if my mom's okay?"

"She should be," Sam answered. "I mean, I haven't checked on her, but she should be fine. Crowley wouldn't hurt her. She's leverage over you."

_"Leverage?"_

He sensed, more than heard, someone come up behind him. "Yeah. Sorry, give me a second, someone's here." He twisted around and looked up into the sneering face of Sylvester. He bit back a groan and instead lowered the phone to his shoulder to say, "Hi."

"And what are you doing outside during school hours?"

"Free period. Hanging out until school's over."

"Phones aren't allowed on school property."

Sam fought back the temptation to roll his eyes. "Do you want me to walk twenty feet across the road?"

"Then you'd be playing hooky."

"Free period," Sam said again. "No class for me to play hooky _for._ " He got to his feet with more grace than he would have managed the first time he was fourteen. "Don’t you have a class right now?"

"Lucky for me, I have a free period now, too."

"And you decided to take time out of your kid-free hour to talk to me? I'm touched," Sam drawled, drawing a little more heavily on Dean's persona than perhaps he should.

The glare she leveled at him might have scared him a little had he been anyone else in the school. "I'm watching you," she threatened before turning around and stalking off.

Sam sank back down into the grass and put the phone to his ear. "Sorry about that. Had to enroll in high school so I wouldn't get CPS on my ass."

"That must suck for you. So about my mom?"

"Right, yeah, Crowley won't have touched her. He needs to be able to manipulate you. But there's no point taking her unless he knows where you are and how to get in touch with you. Look, it's Friday, right? Get here, and tomorrow night we'll head down and grab her. She can come with us or stay where she is after I protect the house. And you're both going to need anti-possession tattoos. But we can talk when you get here. Is there a bus or do I need to come get you when I get off work tonight?"

"The next bus leaves two o'clock tomorrow."

"Okay. I'll pick you up tonight. What town are you in?"

"Winchester, actually."

Sam snorted. "I'll pick you up at the bus depot."

"Yeah, okay."

"Okay. Stay in plain sight. Don't go anywhere on your own - always be surrounded by people. Crowley won't make a scene if he finds you as long as you're in public. He won't want to tip his hand."

"Okay."

"Call me if you need to."

"I'll see you tonight."

The phone went dead in his hand and Sam started planning his route.  
***  
"Sam!"

Sam turned to see the familiar face of Kevin Tran weaving through the crowd. "Hey!" he called back, waving. Kevin had a backpack with him - maybe he had the tablets? He'd found the Purgatory one below the false bottom in the Impala's trunk, so Kevin would have the Hell tablet. If, that is, he'd thought to grab it; escaping from Crowley couldn't have been easy, and Sam wouldn't have been able to blame him for leaving the damn thing behind and just shagging ass away from him.

Kevin slid into the passenger seat of the car without otherwise acknowledging Sam, which hurt, but - well. Kevin probably just wanted out of the mass of people who could be possessed. He tried not to take it personally.

"How'd you get out?" Sam asked a few minutes later.

"Crowley had me translating the demon tablet. Found a recipe for demon bombs. Tricked him out by telling him I knew where a devil's gate was. Blew the guards to smithereens and ran."

Sam nodded. "Smart."

"So. You're fourteen. What've you been up to?"

"Got a job and an apartment. Going to school so I don't get the cops on my ass. Faked a license saying I'm sixteen and papers saying I'm an emancipated minor. Work at a garage now with some people who know monsters exist but don't hunt themselves."

"So high school?"

"High school."

"How's that going for you?"

Sam snorted. "An extracurricular's required to graduate. I ended up in _glee club._ "

"Glee club? Seriously?" Kevin started laughing.

Sam laughed, too. "Yeah, I know. Ridiculous, right? But at least the competition shit's over."

"Competition?" Kevin wheezed. "You went to a fucking _glee club competition?"_

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," Sam grumbled, but he was smiling. "So, I have work tomorrow until three, but after that we can go get your mom. Sound good?"

"Yeah."

"Awesome. You'll have to come with me to work, okay? The apartment's protected, but Crowley can probably still get in if he really wants to. You can work on one of the tablets, maybe."

"Why would I do that?" he demanded.

Sam sighed. "You're a prophet, Kevin. You're the only one who can tell us how to turn the tide here. Please, man, we need you to do this. And I want to know what happened to Dick Roman after we stabbed his smug little face, for the sake of my own curiosity if nothing else. You've gotta be wondering what happened there, too."

Kevin sighed. "Fine. But I've been staring at the demon tablet for so long, I don't know if I can take it much longer."

"That's okay. I have the Purgatory tablet, too. And it doesn't have to be done right now. Take your time, man."

Kevin nodded and looked out the window. In seconds, he was asleep. Sam was too used to the post-escape adrenaline crash to wake him up, even though he was bursting with curiosity - if Kevin had survived, had Dean? - and he wanted Kevin to get the Purgatory tablet done _now_ so he might be able to understand how the hell he'd woken up half his age with soul scars on his skin. But he wasn't quite desperate enough to wake up someone who'd been tortured for Sam's failures, so he turned his attention to the road and drove.


	10. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kevin, Mrs. Tran, Kurt, and Christmas.

Ch. 10 - "Home"

It was a four-hour drive from Lima to Neighbor, Michigan. Kevin spent it staring down at the tablet in his lap and napping. He parked across the street from the Trans' house and settled in to watch. There was a mailman stopping at the same four boxes and a gardener watering plants so thoroughly drenched the water was running down to the street.

He reached over and shook Kevin, who jolted awake. "We here?"

Sam gripped Kevin's bicep to keep him from getting out. "There's two demons I can see and probably another in the house. I'll take care of them, but I need you to stay here - they can't get inside this car."

"What if you get hurt?"

"I'm leaving the keys in the ignition. I get taken down, you run, got it? The apartment's as safe as I could make it - here's my phone, call Garth." He passed his cell over. "He'll protect you. Just stay here until I tell you it's safe."

"Sam-"

"I'll be fine." He palmed Ruby's knife - funny how it was still _her_ knife, after all these years - and managed a smile. "I'm going to try to exorcise them first, but if I can't, I'm going to have to deal with a few corpses. _Stay here._ "

He climbed out before Kevin could do anything else and locked his eyes onto the demons, starting to mutter an exorcism. It was open air, there was nothing blocking his line of sight, and they weren't expecting an attack - the incantation should work.

Work it did, and the smoke poured from their mouths to arrow into the ground. Sam opened the door again and leaned in. "Think your mom'll let me in the house if you're not with me?"

"Not a chance."

"Didn't think so. Grab the holy water from the glove compartment, will ya?"

Kevin did as he was told and scrambled out of the car. Sam took the bottle from him and put a hand under Kevin's elbow, watching the surrounding area for any surprises.

They reached the door unaccosted, and Sam unscrewed the cap from the water bottle while Kevin knocked on the door. Mrs. Tran opened the door mere seconds later. "Kevin?" she said, tears choking her voice.

Kevin glanced at Sam, who took that as his cue to squirt her with the holy water.

"The hell?" she snapped, staring at him.

"Good. Anyone else in the house?"

"What do you-"

"Mom," Kevin interrupted. "Is there anyone else in the house?"

"Eunis, but-"

"Inside," Sam ordered, pushing Kevin in and locking the door behind them. "Where is she?"

"Uh, kitchen - why -"

"I'll take care of it. Kevin?"

Kevin threw his arms around his mother and Sam closed the door behind them. 

"Linda? Who is it?" someone called. Sam readied the bottle and doused the woman who came through the door. She screamed and fell back, skin smoking, and Sam went down with her, putting Ruby's knife to her neck and spitting out the Latin. She jerked side to side, trying to get away from the blade, but Sam had her pinned and she knew it was exorcism or permanent death. Unsurprisingly, she chose exorcism, and the smoke poured out of her throat and through an open window.

Sam slid the knife back into the sheath and put two fingers on the side of the woman's neck. "She's still alive."

"Good," Kevin said from behind him.

"What was that?" Mrs. Tran said.

Beneath him, Eunis coughed. Sam stood from where he'd been straddling her. "Demon. Eunis will confirm. But right now - they were watching you. Sent 'em back to hell, but they'll be back. Which means we need to leave. Pack a bag, we're going."

"Who are you?"

Eunis groaned. Sam looked at Kevin. "You wanna fill her in while I go over the post-possession routine?"

"Yeah. Come on, Mom, I'll explain." He led his mother away while Sam knelt down beside the other woman.

"Who're you?" she mumbled.

"My name's Sam Winchester," he said. "You've been possessed. Do you remember anything?"

"Flashes."

"Well, that's something. When it happened to me I remembered the whole week. Killed four people. Come on - let's get some sugar in you. It'll help." He pulled her up off the ground and led her to the kitchen, where he made her sit at the table. "What's your name?"

"Eunis Baker."

"Okay, Eunis. Let's get you some tea, all right?"

She put her face in her hands, shaking violently. Sam started opening cabinets, pulling down a box of chamomile, sugar, and a mug. He shoveled four teaspoons of sugar into the bottom of the mug, filled it with water, and threw it in the microwave for a minute and a half. He hitched a hip on the counter and offered, "Wanna talk about it?"

"It was - it was just smoke. And then I couldn't control my body."

"I know."

"How? How could you possibly know?"

"Because I've been there. Twice. Once with a demon, like you've got." The microwave beeped and he took out the mug. "Once with...something else. Not counting the ghosts, witches, all that, that messed with my head. So yeah, I get it." He slid the mug, still with the teabag in, over to her. "Careful, it's hot, but you need that. And you need it sweet." He settled across from her. "How much do you remember?"

"Um, it was - it went down my throat. Yesterday. Morning." _Right around the time Kevin escaped,_ Sam thought. "It was - flashes, since then. But I haven't really - it did what I should have done months ago-"

"It's okay," Sam said gently. "Drink. It'll help."

She wrapped her hands around the mug and shivered. "It happened to you? And you're all right?"

"I'm fine. It shouldn’t - there are no aftereffects. I'll draw something for you - if you get it tattooed on, it can't ever happen again." He grabbed a napkin and pen from the table and started drawing. "I have it myself. Kevin and Mrs. Tran are going to have to get it, too."

"Get what?"

Sam looked over to see Kevin and his mother standing in the doorway. "Tattoo," he said. "Kevin's gotten you up to speed?"

"Yes. Although I have to say, it's not how I would have envisioned my son."

Sam half-smiled. "I can only imagine."

"What about you? What did your parents say?"

Sam huffed a laugh. "Dad was shoving me into this headfirst with a gun in my hand." He knocked twice on the table and stood. "Not to rush things along, but they'll be back soon. We need to go. Eunis, you should be safe enough, they don't care about you." He slid the paper over. "Get that on you. Right over your heart is best, but anywhere will work."

"Thank you," Eunis said.

Sam nodded. "No problem. Kevin, Mrs. Tran?"

"We're coming," Mrs. Tran said.

"I go first," Sam said. "Kevin, you last."

They made it to the car without incident, and for half an hour, Mrs. Tran grilled Kevin about what he'd been doing with his life. Then Kevin said, "Can we grab something to eat?"

"Sure," Sam said. "I'll hop off at the next exit. What do you feel like?"

"Something with vegetables," Mrs. Tran said instantly.

"Mom," Kevin groaned.

"Two teenage boys on their own, you think I'm not going to make sure you eat right?"

Sam glanced over at Kevin. "You didn't tell her?"

He shrugged. "We ran out of time."

Sam sighed. "Mrs. Tran, a few months ago my brother Dean and I were on a hunt. He died and I was deaged. I'm actually twenty-eight."

There was silence for a moment, and then she said, "Why should I believe that?"

"Kevin, look in the glovebox. There's a box marked 'IDs'. Grab a couple with my face on them and pass 'em back."

Kevin did as he was told. Sam took the exit while Mrs. Tran was examining them. "Gas station okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," Kevin said.

"Mm-hmm," Mrs. Tran said distractedly. "These are all you?"

"Yeah. The pictures are a few years old, but yeah."

"So if you couldn't stop that, what makes you the best qualified to protect my son?"

Sam winced. "The current king of Hell is too afraid of me to dare pissing me off by attacking directly. He knows if he does, he's dead. I've got the only two things on Earth that can kill him, he's not going to jeopardize himself." That he had a better claim to the throne, according to Meg, he didn't share. He should probably ask around and see if he could find her; she was a bitch, but she'd definitely helped them out a few times. "Kevin, while Crowley had you, did you hear anything about a Meg?"

"Uh...no, why?"

"Just curious. She helped us break into SucroCorp to kill Dick. Wondering if Crowley has her, too."

"You can't save everyone, Sam," Kevin said.

He snorted. "Believe me, the last twenty years have drilled that into my head."  
***  
They ended up settled in at Sam's apartment. He took them to a tattoo parlor to get the symbol put on them. Kevin cried through his; Mrs. Tran held his hand and took the ink like a seasoned pro. Sam got an Enochian protective sigil put on the other side of his chest - Cas may have hid him from the angels, but there was no reason he couldn't also be hidden from demons.

Sunday night, Sam looked at Kevin. "You interested in finishing high school?"

"What?"

"Are you interested in finishing high school?" he repeated.

"Um, not really. I have the tablets to work on."

Sam nodded. "Okay. I have school and work tomorrow, so I won't be back until around eight - you both okay with that?"

They nodded, so the next day Sam left for school. He called at lunch, during his break period, and while he was driving to work.

Mrs. Tran picked up the third time. "We're fine. Stop worrying."

"Okay."

Kurt gave him a weird look when he hung up. "Something going on?"

"Just - protecting a couple people from demons. No big deal." He faked a smile.

Sam threw himself into school, work, and hunts, desperate to outrun the creeping sense that he was failing at something. Mrs. Tran got a job in a local office to help pay the bills. Kevin worked steadily on the Purgatory tablet, which held information on creatures other than the Leviathan and on the general makeup of the place. "There's a human portal," Kevin told him one night when neither of them could sleep for the nightmares. "At the mouth of where the two rivers meet. Guess God wanted a way for people to get out."

"Maybe monsters can redeem themselves somehow," Sam said.

"How?"

"No idea. Maybe it's on there."

Kevin huffed a laugh and bent back over the tablet, shivering a little; the heat was broken in the apartment building, and December in Ohio was freezing.

Sam joined the Hummels for dinner Christmas day, knocking on their door a little before two. Kurt opened the door and grinned at him. "Just in time," he said, reaching down and grabbing Sam's hand to pull him inside.

"In time for what?" Sam asked, following willingly. The Trans didn't celebrate Christmas, so they hadn't gotten food for an all-out dinner, and Kurt's house smelled fantastic. He wasn't sure he'd ever done much for Christmas, except the year leading up to Dean's deal when he'd decorated a plastic tree with air fresheners.

"Turkey's just coming out," Kurt answered. "Come on. Have you met Carole?"

"Uh, no. Who's-"

"Finn's mom. My stepmother." Sam nodded and let Kurt drag him into the kitchen. "Carole!"

A woman with a heavily-lined face turned around from setting a heavy pan on the counter. "Kurt!"

"This is Sam."

"Good to meet you, Sam." She smiled, eyes darting down to where he suddenly realized he was still holding Kurt's hand.

He quickly extricated himself and offered his other hand for her to shake. "Ma'am."

"Oh, please. It's Carole." She smiled kindly.

"Can I help you with anything?"

"Um, no, I think we're set. But thank you for the offer."

It was, all in all, one of the most uncomfortable meals Sam had ever had. Burt and Kurt both knew enough about Sam's former life to not ask any more questions about it, but Carole and Finn kept trying to talk to him about things that most people found normal but were a minefield for Sam. Parents' jobs? Former schooling? Future plans? Friends and family? Significant others? (The last was asked by Carole with a suspiciously large wink at Kurt, and Sam had to hide a flinch - every single one of the girls he'd ever dated was now dead.) The best that could be said was that Burt and Kurt both tried to steer the conversation away from him whenever possible, and Finn caught on fairly quickly; despite his usual obtuseness, it seemed he could see when Sam was uncomfortable. Sam left that night with half a pie and a sense of relief. He much preferred the chicken breasts and broccoli with Kevin and Mrs. Tran to the huge production and forced conversation.

May approached quickly, bringing with it Sam's birthday. After the Cage, he'd never been quite sure how old he was turning, and with the latest setback in life, the issue got even more complicated. Was his body turning twenty-nine, fifteen, or seventeen? Twenty-nine years of being his, fifteen years of this particular incarnation of it, seventeen according to his ID.

He shoved it to the back of his mind and ignored it, allowing the day to pass unremarked upon.

One weekend he looked at Kevin. "You wanna get out of this place for a while?"

"The sooner this is done the sooner I can get back to normal life," he said without looking up.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Come on, Kevin. The last time you left the apartment was, like, _March._ You need some vitamin D in you."

"I'm next to a window."

"Kevin. I'm serious." Sam sat beside him. "Don't think I haven't seen the nosebleeds and the weight you've lost. You're pushing yourself way too hard. You need to take a break before you stroke out."

"What would you know about it?"

Sam sighed. "When I was fourteen - the first time around - my dad and brother were hunting something three states away. They were depending on my research. I went to the library, and there was nothing. This was before internet was as big as it is now, so not being able to find something on paper was a huge deal. Especially when people were dying.

"I remember, there was a coffee cart outside. I would go buy coffee every three hours, like clockwork. Triple red-eyes. Dad screamed himself hoarse at me when I told him I didn't have anything yet. So that night I broke in to the library and kept looking. Left before the librarians came in, then entered with the morning crowd. Skipped school, kept drinking coffee. The second night I started getting arrhythmias. Dad kept screaming and I kept looking. I ended up having a minor heart arrhythmia around three o'clock on the third day. Had to refuse transport to the hospital because we couldn't afford it. If it had been a little worse - if I hadn't come to before the paramedics loaded me into the ambulance - Dad would've whupped my ass. He almost did when they called to tell him. That night I got Dad telling me if it happened again I'd be a liability, and Dean telling me I needed to take better care of myself and be better at researching so it wouldn't come to that.

"So I had a choice - I could push myself to that point, or I could get beaten half to death. And it wasn't an isolated incident, that happened more than I cared to count. I started watching my caffeine intake more closely after that one. Your choice, right here, is push yourself to that point when there's no need to or take a break and take care of _yourself._ Cause nothing's worse dying for, Kevin. Not when you can prevent it."

Kevin stared at him. "You had a heart attack and your dad kept yelling at you to do better?"

"Arrhythmia, but basically, yeah."

"And Dean told you it wouldn't have happened if you'd been better at researching?"

"Yeah. And then he gave me advice on how to talk to girls, because there was one named Amy I'd been talking to. She was my first kiss. Ended up being a monster - a kitsune, they eat the hypothalamus gland in the brain - but."

He shook his head. "Your family is fucked up."

Sam snorted. "Kinda, yeah. So come on - let's take a walk. Maybe go to the park and toss a Frisbee or something."

Kevin sighed. "You're not letting this go, are you?"

"Nope. You're too damn pale."

He laughed and pushed his chair back. "Lemme shower and change."

Sam got a text from Kurt while he was waiting for Kevin to come out. _Want to hang out?_

He considered. _Going to the park on Main with Kevin. Would you like to come?_

A moment later, his phone buzzed. _Meet you there._

Kevin came out of the shower and Sam said, "Hey, uh, a friend of mine's gonna meet us there, if that's okay? His name's Kurt."

"Uh, yeah, I guess. When'd you get friends?"

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, seriously. When did you get friends?"

 _When they stopped dying on me,_ his treacherous mind whispered, but all he said was, "Shut up, smartass. Let's go."

When Kurt met them at the park, he threw a red dodgeball at Sam's chest, its shadow racing the rubber to see which would reach its target first. The ball won. "How's it going?"

Sam laughed and tossed it back. "Pretty good. This is Kevin."

"Hey."

"Hey."

"How'd you two meet?"

"We saved a fallen angel from a mental institution with the help of a demon," Kevin said casually.

Kurt burst out laughing. Sam and Kevin both blinked at him uncertainly - and then Kurt's face fell as the penny dropped. "You weren't joking, were you?"

"No." Sam tossed the ball to Kevin. "He showed up, ended up getting nabbed by leviathan - he's who we were trying to save when Dean and Cas died."

"Oh." Kurt winced. Talk turned to lighter things.

An hour later, Sam jogged off to the bathroom and Kevin moved closer to Kurt. "You like him, don't you?"

"What?"

"Oh, come on. It's all over your face. You wanna date him."

Kurt shrugged. "Maybe?"

Kevin snorted. "Bullshit."

"What is this, the hurt-him-and-you'll-hurt-me speech?" Kurt tried to joke.

Kevin sighed. "I'm just saying. Be careful. People close to him tend to die in horribly painful ways. And you know _nothing_ about him."

"I know enough."

"Really? So you know who tortured him two years ago?" Kurt didn't answer. "You didn't even know he'd been tortured, did you? Look. I'm not trying to come off as the protective older brother. God knows I'd fail miserably at it if I tried. But be careful with him. You have no idea how fragile he is."

" _He's_ fragile?"

Kevin caught sight of Sam jogging back towards them and said, "He really is. Good talk, Kurt."

He moved back to a proper throwing distance and tossed the ball back over. When Sam rejoined them, he didn't even know they'd had a conversation.

That night, Kevin finished translating the Leviathan part of the Tablet and whispered, "Fuck," instantly gaining the attention of the other two occupants. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" he yelled, punching the doorframe.

"Kevin," Mrs. Tran said. "What's wrong?"

Kevin looked up, tears tracking down his cheeks. "Dean's in Purgatory."

The floor dropped out from under Sam. "What? No. That's not possible."

"I'm sorry," he said. "The Tablet's clear - well, clear as God ever gets. 'When the king is destroyed, a portal is opened and all enters and is transformed.' You were transformed, Sam - that leaves Dean and Cas to be the 'entered' part of that."

"No," Sam repeated. "No, Kevin, that can't be right."

"I'm sorry."

Sam ran a hand through his hair and turned back to stare blindly at the stove. "Fuck. You're positive? One hundred percent?"

"One hundred percent," Kevin said.

Sam snarled. "How do I get in?"

"Get in?" Mrs. Tran repeated. "Sam, no. You're not going into Purgatory."

"I have to get Dean."

"Sam," she said gently, "it's been eight months. Do you really think he could have-"

"He's alive," Sam interrupted. "Dean is alive, and he's trapped. I have to get to him. Kevin, _how do I get in?_ "


End file.
